


Adventures in Rome

by Jedi Buttercup (jedibuttercup)



Series: Death is Only the Beginning [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: Award Nominees, Canon Het Relationship, Crossover, Crossover Pairing, F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Reincarnation, UST, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2006-05-20
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/pseuds/Jedi%20Buttercup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since the Year of Glory, strange men in robes had rubbed Buffy's nerves the wrong way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First begun, and longest, story in my AU Mummy crossover universe. Post-canon for B:tVS; post-Mummy Returns and AU for Mummy canon as per the events of "Death is Only the Beginning".
> 
> (Posting while still WIP to properly link the series, though most of them also function perfectly well as standalones. Chapter 9 written for a Wishlist prompt from xgirl2222.)
> 
> Runner-up in [Round 24](http://sunnydawards.dragonydreams.com/round24/winners24.html) of the Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards, in the category "Best Movie Crossover".

Ever since the Year of Glory, strange men in robes had rubbed Buffy's nerves the wrong way. Caleb and the Bringers had only made the phobia worse; the only good thing that ever came her way from people dressed like that was Dawn herself, and even then, Buffy had issues with the way the monks had arranged things. So when she saw a matched set of such men coming out of Paolo's offices one day, vaguely Middle Eastern of feature and bright-eyed with excitement, muttering something like 'Under Tip', she was instantly concerned.

When she asked Paolo about the men later over a light meal, he merely furrowed his brow a little, then gave an embarrassed laugh and shrugged his shoulders expansively. "You have caught me out," he said. "As long as I have lived, I have seen many things go into the ground, but there are things even older than I, and for me they hold a certain fascination. My visitors, they were archaeologists; they have uncovered a new step pyramid, and must have been comparing it to the original, built by an ancient architect called Imhotep."

She accepted a kiss from him, smiled and exchanged witty nothings for the remainder of the date, but the incident and his answer were not forgotten. She'd originally struck up an acquaintance with the Immortal for one very important reason, one that all the flirting and dating and dancing were only window dressing for: there might be no Willy to beat up for rumors in the Eternal City, but there _was_ a focal point for supernatural traffic, and Paolo was it.

That evening after patrol she called Giles' flat in England and reported both sighting and conversation. Her long-time Watcher was silent for several seconds, long enough for her to frown at the receiver and wonder if the line had gone dead; then she realized she _was_ hearing something, the faint sound of fabric scratching over glass.

Buffy sighed. "Go ahead. 'Oh Dear Lord' me, I'm a big girl."

"It's rather worse than that, I'm afraid," Giles said gravely.

Buffy started; she'd expected some kind of Big Bad or other, but from the tone of Giles' voice this was going to be at least a seven point five on the apocalypse scale. "I take it we're not looking at some long-dead pyramid building guy?"

He chuckled, mirthlessly, over the line. "No. We are, in fact, looking at a mummified High Priest of Osiris who was buried nearly fourteen hundred years later. You would recall, an Urn of Osiris was used in the ritual to return you to life?"

Mention of her resurrection still made Buffy wince, but the sting of heaven lost had long since faded away like any other wound gone to scar. "So we're talking about an enemy that can't die," she surmised aloud. Those were always the worst kind.

"Oh, he can," Giles replied, negatively. "But it takes either the power of a god or the Egyptian Book of the Living; the former is unavailable to us, and the latter has been lost since 1933 when he was last defeated."

"Great," Buffy rolled her eyes. "Next thing you're going to tell me, if I don't stop them before they bring him back, he's going to wipe out the whole world?"

This was an old joke between them; Giles wasn't really in the mood to play, but she could hear a faint smile in his voice as he replied. "How did you know?" he asked, making an effort to sound surprised.

"That's always the story," she said, lightly, then took a deep breath. "Okay. I'll poke around, ask Dawn to do a little digging on the Internet. Are you going to send me a Watcher with musty books?"

"I'm not sure that will do you much good in this case," he told her. "You would be better warned by looking up the Ten Plagues of Moses in the Bible; the Creature is capable of summoning each of them once fully awakened, in addition to wielding considerable telekinetic powers. I will send you Willow instead, and... a pair of unofficial field agents who may come in useful."

"What kind of field agents?" she asked, frowning.

Giles didn't usually send Watcher personnel out to meet her anymore; Andrew was her main tie to the Council, and sometimes Xander when he managed a call out of central Africa. She'd met a few of the researchers, and of course she remembered the black ops team that had come after Faith back when Faith was wearing her body, but neither type would be useful in a fight against a Glory-level threat. The fact that Willow, the Big Gun herself, was traveling with them implied a lot about the type she _was_ going to get.

"A librarian and a former soldier," Giles answered. "Who just so happen to have fought against him in 1933, and also in 1923 the first time he was awakened."

Buffy frowned, adding dates in her head. "Demons?" she had to ask. Not that she wouldn't work with them-- after Spike and Clem and Anya, she'd finally learned to see the world in shades of gray-- but if her prospective allies posed any kind of threat or, worse, had gross bodily habits, she wanted to know ahead of time.

"No," Giles said. "They're both very human. Evelyn was briefly killed during the struggle in 1933 and brought back to life with the Book of the Dead; as a unexpected side effect of the process, she afterward ceased to age. Her husband, Rick, was himself empowered as the Champion of Anubis when he killed the Scorpion King that day; though he instructed Anubis' army to go directly to hell, beginning a process that leveled the oasis and buried the Creature along with it, it did not change the fact that he had become the living hand of an ancient deity. Despite renouncing the title, he retains a few aspects of that status, immortality being one of them."

Buffy tried to imagine a world in which Willow's resurrection spell had made her eternally twenty-one, where Spike had survived the collapse of the Hellmouth and they'd gone on being champions together for another seventy years. Then she winced and shook her head, blinking away tears. "Okay," she said. "First-hand experience with the Big Bad, always a plus. They'll have my address, right? I don't have to pick them up?"

Giles murmured an agreement. "They should arrive with Willow in the early afternoon, provided I am able to reach them in time."

"I'll call you again when they get here," she replied, then exchanged goodbyes.

* * *

Buffy spent the rest of the night and most of the following morning hunting robed bad guys all over town. It helped that she and Dawn had long since located most of the buildings Paolo owned; if she'd had to search all of Rome, she'd have been forced to call in several of the baby Slayers also based in Italy, and that would have attracted unwanted attention at this stage of the game.

She finally tracked them down in a block of flats not very far from the local Wolfram & Hart offices. Several of Paolo's minion-types were unobtrusively on guard; it was a good thing she was expecting them, because if she hadn't been paying attention they might have seen her. Mixed in with them were a few other soldiery guys she didn't recognize, and at least one magic user of evil lawyer vintage she'd run up against several months before. It looked like the two biggest powers in the town were joining forces on this one.

Either Wolfram & Hart didn't know the full truth about what this Creature-Imhotep could do, or they had figured out some way of keeping a leash on him. Either way, things were probably about to get very messy. She knew from Angel's stories of Darla that the firm had a way of bringing dead things back wherever they wanted to, which meant Paolo wasn't going to have to find the magic sand dune or whatever and dig the mummy out of it first.

She drew a red X on a copy of the local street map she habitually carried so she could show the others where it was without having to get all "Past the third cafe on the left" about it, then trekked back to her place to catch a nap and wait for the cavalry.

Buffy woke to Willow's voice in the living room talking quietly with several other people around tea-time. Not quite "early afternoon", but close enough; she doubted the bad guys would move before dark. Evil usually had a complex about hiding its work in the shadows, and Wolfram & Hart was no exception.

She threw on a set of patrolling clothes in shades of cream and brown leather-- better than black for blending in when she had to be out both before and after dark on the same day. Her hair had grown out a little since she'd left Sunnydale, so she secured it back with a matching leather tie and threw on the minimal amount of make-up required for guests, then went out to greet her new allies.

Buffy spotted the man first-- Rick, Giles had called him?-- flipping through a stack of papers on the kitchen counter with a frown on his face. Probably the research she'd asked Dawn to work on when she first got home. He was wearing modern jeans hugging an impressive pair of glutes, paired with a white linen shirt and an ancient-looking set of leather suspenders: a comfortable mix of clothing from his era and hers. His brown shaggy hair hung in his face a little, though it did nothing to hide his moderately attractive features; he had a leather bracer wrapped around one wrist and at least one pair of pistols on his person. He probably had more weapons, too, tucked away out of sight.

Near him, seated at the dining table, was a woman with long dark hair and a hint of the exotic in her bone structure. She, too, wore jeans, paired with brown leather boots, a low-cut brown shirt with a gold Egyptian necklace hovering above the neckline, and a lighter-colored over-shirt rolled up a little at the cuffs. She had outlined her eyes in a dark shade of kohl, and she looked no happier to be there than her husband. She had been holding a conversation with Willow, but she looked up at Buffy's approach, a subdued smile of greeting tugging at her mouth.

Buffy smiled in return. Her first instinct was to like this couple; hopefully, that would hold through the battles sure to follow.

"Hi, I'm Buffy Summers," she said, and stepped forward to shake hands.


	2. Chapter 2

The woman rose from her chair and clasped Buffy's hand in a firm grip. "Pleased to make your acquaintance," she said. "I'm Evelyn O'Connell, but you can call me Evy. And that nosy lout over there is my husband, Rick." Warmth sparkled in her eyes as she spoke.

"Hey! She said I could look," Rick yelped in reply, making a show of being offended, but to Buffy's Scooby-educated eye he looked more amused than anything. He abandoned the stack of papers, then took her hand as his wife released it, bowing over it in a gentlemanly fashion. "And at least I know better than to read any of it aloud," he added in an aside, flashing a wide, white smile in Buffy's direction.

"I'm guessing there's a story there," she said wryly as he let go of her hand, thinking of Xander and the speaking of Latin in the library.

He was more than a head taller than Buffy, and she felt faintly dwarfed by his presence. It wasn't just the height, either; there was something intangibly massive about him, like a supernatural gravity well. It probably had something to do with that Anuby-thing Giles had mentioned earlier; whatever it was, it made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, though not in an evil-vibe-y kind of way. It was just... there, like his blue eyes or callused hands, and kind of distracting.

"You're not wrong," he told her, eyes dancing as he glanced over at his wife.

"Oh, you," Evy fumed, suppressing a grin as she swatted him on the arm. "You're never going to let that go, are you?"

"Considering what we're here for?" he asked ruefully, raising his eyebrows.

The humor drained out of Evy's expression. "Well, it isn't our fault this time, and it wasn't the last time, either. I can't imagine what they're thinking, bringing him back now. The only person whose orders he took at Ahm Shere was Anck-su-namun..."

"And after what she did to him there..." Rick shook his head. "He's not going to be a happy camper."

Buffy made a face, her pleasant observations of the couple derailed as their reason for visiting reared its ugly head. "Great, just what I need. Another bulletproof religious nut with a grievance against women." She took a seat at the table with a sigh, then smiled up at Willow as the witch slid a cup of coffee and a pastry in front of her. "Thanks, Wills."

"No problem," she said. "We already ate, and I figured you wouldn't have got up yet." She waved the others to their seats, then moved the stack of papers from counter to table and sat down in the last free chair with another paper cup bearing the Starbucks logo.

Buffy took a bite of the pastry, allowing herself a moment to ignore the calorie content and enjoy the sweet taste, then washed it down with a sip of her skinny latte and refocused on the issue at hand. "So," she said. "First things first. I tracked down the guys in the robes; they're in a block of flats over by the local Wolfram and Hart offices."

Willow nodded and shuffled one of the pieces of paper out of the stack. "You left the map out on the counter this morning; Dawn looked up the address and left me a note."

"These guys in the robes," Rick said, leaning forward with a serious expression on his face. "They wouldn't happen to have any facial tattoos, would they?" He made a gesture toward his cheekbones. "Like words in Arabic?"

Evy turned toward him, a shocked expression on her face. "Rick! You don't think..."

He reached out to clasp one of her hands in his own, shaking his head a little. "Probably not, but it doesn't hurt to check. Ammar's a stand-up guy, and he's got Rashad to back him up, but he's no Ardeth, you know? And not everyone agrees with him that the Medjai should stick to their traditional lifestyle in this day and age. If one of the tribal leaders is sneaking around behind Ammar's back, looking to cut a deal..."

Buffy frowned at him, something about his description tickling at the back of her brain... not from the guys she'd seen the day before, but from something someone else had reported recently. She couldn't remember who it had been, though, or when. "I didn't see any tattoos," she answered, after a moment's thought. "They all looked kind of Middle-Eastern-y to me, but none of them were all that memorable, and most of them wore turbans. I'm not sure I'd recognize them again if they ditched the tentwear."

Rick sighed, settling a little, a relieved expression smoothing out his features. "Good," he said. "The Medjai are pretty much the only family either of us has now, except for a few random cousins of Evy's; I'd hate to see them implicated in this."

Willow frowned at that, fidgeting with her cup. "I thought Giles said you had a son?"

Evy and Rick exchanged a long look, full of old grief, that made Buffy's nerves crawl with the wanting to whip out her cell phone and dial Dawnie's number. "Had, is the right word," Evy said quietly, smiling sadly in Willow's direction. "Alex. He died about forty years ago, defending his wife's people."

"I'm so sorry," Willow said, wincing. "I didn't know."

"It's all right," Evy assured her. "It was a long time ago. We visit his children and grand-children every now and again-- the Medjai are much more open to alternative views of reality than most cultures, so we don't have to hide our identities among them-- but we've never been able to stay with them as much as I would like."

And there was that mention of the Medjai again; Buffy frowned as the nagging sensation in the back of her mind grew stronger. Oh well; if it were really important, she'd remember it soon enough. "So, tell me about this Impotent guy," she said, steering the conversation back on track. "Giles says he's pretty powerful for the evil undead, but he didn't really make with the details, and I'd rather not get caught unprepared." She'd faced that kind of battle more than enough over her last year in Sunnydale; she never wanted to risk that kind of bodycount on her watch ever again.

Rick choked on a laugh. "'Impotent' isn't exactly a word I'd use to describe him. He got cursed in the first place because he was having an affair with the Pharaoh's mistress."

Willow perked up a little at that. "Oh! And of course the Pharaoh caught them, right?" She feathered through the stack of papers again, apparently looking for the reference in question.

"Yes, and then they killed him," Evy said, with a sour twist to her mouth. "Seti's daughter, Nefertiri, was watching from the balcony when it happened and called for the Pharaoh's bodyguards, but they were too late. Anck-su-namun killed herself rather than be captured, and Imhotep's priests carried him away to safety in the confusion. A few days later, Imhotep returned to steal her body, then took her to Hamunaptra to resurrect her. Fortunately, the Medjai were able to stop him that time, and turned him over to the new Pharaoh-- Seti's son Ramses-- for judgment."

Buffy was really starting to get a Watcher-y vibe about these Medjai guys. If they were running around in whatever-hundred BC trying to protect the Pharaohs, what were they still doing running around the desert three thousand years later? The answer was almost on the tip of her tongue-- she knew it!-- but there was something else bothering her, too.

"So why that curse?" she asked, thinking about the whole invulnerability angle and the Plagues of Moses thing. What kind of insane troll logic would make someone give a criminal that kind of power?

"What do you mean?" Evy asked, furrowing her brow.

"She means, how'd he end up so powerful?" Rick translated. At Buffy's look of surprise, he shrugged and added, "It never really made sense to me either, that first time out."

"Oh." Evy drew a deep breath, then pushed back her chair and stood, pacing slowly around the room. "Yes, well. It wasn't an accident, or anything like that; they knew perfectly well what might happen if he ever got free, but at the time, it seemed like the trade-offs were worth the reward." She trailed her fingertips along the edge of a bookcase as she walked, frowning absentmindedly at the titles as she passed by them. "Ramses could not let the death of our father go unpunished, and I... his sister was furious beyond all reason. The Hom'Dai promised eternal suffering for the victim."

"I get it," Willow said, nodding solemnly. "Buffy, you know the work I was doing with the coven in England? One thing they explained to me was that powerful magic of any kind, light or dark, needs a counterbalance, something built into the spell itself, or else it spills over on everything around it. That was part of my problem; every time I cast a spell, all the way back from what happened with Angel, it was like I was splashing ink on myself. Tara helped for awhile-- she knew how to do it right-- but she didn't know all the reasons _why_ , and I got frustrated with it, so I took shortcuts whenever I could. By the time she was killed..."

"Gotcha," Buffy nodded. "Scary dark-vein-y Willow." She turned back to the O'Connell's, who seemed more grim than confused at the turn of the conversation-- Giles must have been blabbing. "So they were scared of the Honey-Dew backfiring, and gave him a few power-ups to balance out all the gnashing of teeth?"

"More or less," Evy agreed. "Basically, if he were ever dug up and awakened with the Book of the Dead, the curse guaranteed that he would become a walking disease, with power over the sands, unnatural strength, and all of the ancient plagues of Egypt at his fingertips. Naturally, that meant someone had to stick around to keep him from being dug up, but it was felt that the payoff was worth the sacrifice in his case."

"And that's where the Medjai come in," Rick added. "And how I ended up running into them, that first time. Though of course they've added a few other things to their job description over the years."

Buffy stiffened as it finally came to her, where she'd heard about these guys before. Xander! He'd ridden out from Aswan in search of a Slayer among the desert tribes, and got bounced right away by guys on horses with swords and guns _and tattoos on their faces_ who wouldn't let him anywhere near her. They'd said something about the Watchers trying to take a Slayer from them before, and then dropped a name-- Evelyn Carnahan O'Connell.

"Like keeping Watchers away from Slayers?" she asked slowly, watching them both for their reactions.

Both Rick and his wife stiffened in their seats; Rick glanced at Evy, frowning at her for a minute, then nodded and turned back to Buffy. "Yeah, Rupert mentioned one of your guys ran into them out in the desert. From the description, it sounded like he ran into one of Alex's grandsons, Rashad's son Asim; he's kind of a hothead, but he knows his family history pretty well. The Slayer that the Council came after back in the thirties was a distant cousin of his, and they killed a lot of people getting to her. The current Slayer is his father's half-sister's daughter, as well as being the chief's great-niece, so you can see where he wasn't really feeling like taking chances on the word of a complete stranger."

Buffy narrowed her eyes at him. "Then why are _you_ working with us?"

Evy sighed. "Rupert's mother was a Carnahan, not a close relation, but enough of one that I kept track of the family over the years. When the Council buildings were blown up and he was reported missing, Rick and I did a little investigating; that's mostly what we do to keep busy nowadays, look into the sort of thing that modern police dismiss as fairy-tales and hokum. After we found him, he told us what was going on, and we've been helping to locate Potentials and Slayers ever since. Truthfully, we kept news of Faiza quiet because we believed she was more than safe enough already, and we did not see any reason to disturb her life any further."

"And how much of this have you told _them_?" Willow asked, shrewdly.

"We actually kinda decided to leave that up to you," Rick said with a shrug. "Asim's on his way here right now with a few friends."

"Excuse me?" Buffy's eyebrows went up. "Guys in dresses, already in my city, about to raise the undead? I'm not waiting around until he gets here."

"And I agree we shouldn't wait," Evy said. "News of their movements is important; they must be setting up for whatever ceremony they have planned, and the fewer surprises on that score the better. However, I'm fairly certain they won't actually resurrect Imhotep until they have the chest he uses to regenerate himself-- the part of the curse that restores him to flesh and full invincibility was written on it when the Hom'Dai was first cast."

"Yeah, written on the box they hid the jars holding his dead girlfriend's guts in," Rick interrupted, wrinkling his nose up in disgust. "Now _that_ was tacky."

Evy swatted him on the arm again and continued. "We've long suspected that the Book of Amun Ra somehow fell into the hands of the Germans during World War II and made its way through the underworld afterward; that's the only thing I can think of that they might hope to use to keep him under their control. However, the chest has been in Medjai custody in the Cairo museum for the last seventy years, out of their reach."

"Until someone stole it a few days ago," Rick added. "Asim was able to track the theft, but not to recover it; he called to let us know it was in transit again just before we came here."

"This just gets better and better," Buffy said, bracing her elbows on the table and lowering her face into her palms. Whatever had happened to the days of see vampire, stake vampire, and go home? Saving the world had turned into such a complicated business. "Okay. So we go out, beat feet around the city for awhile, come back here to sleep if the world doesn't end first, and your tattooed great-grandson arrives when?"

Evy bit her lip. "Late morning," she said.

Buffy sighed. "Okay," she said. "Wills, since it looks like there won't be fireworks tonight, if you want to stick around and wait for Dawn and do some more research...?"

"On it," Willow said, nodding. "Hey, and I brought that digital camera I told you I was ordering for you; maybe you could take some pictures of the robe-y guys, and I'll see if I can find any references in the major law enforcement databanks."

"Good idea," Buffy said. She tilted back her coffee cup, capturing the last few drops of caffeine-y goodness, then pushed back her chair and stood. "Ready to go, guys? You can fill me in some more about what happened the last couple of times you fought this guy while we're out."

The O'Connells nodded. Rick stood, checking his weapons as Evy smoothed at her shirt; as they did so, Buffy noticed absently that neither of them had chosen the chair with its back to the front door when they first sat down. They had left that chair for Willow. She wasn't happy about some of the stuff they'd told her so far, but her instincts still said to trust them, and they clearly weren't newbies at this kind of thing.

She added a short sword and concealing jacket to her personal arsenal on the way out the door, and slipped Willow's camera and her cell phone into the jacket's pockets. Not that she'd answer if Paolo rang-- she had a feeling her shelf life as the Immortal's new love interest had just about expired-- but because she'd promised to call Giles, and in case of Dawnie-emergency. Another apocalypse might be pending, but that didn't mean the rest of her life had ended in the meantime.


	3. Chapter 3

Buffy knew the neighborhood she had tracked the bad guys to that morning would take awhile to return to on foot, but with the sun still above the horizon she wasn't in any particular hurry. The walk would allow her time to get to know the O'Connells a little bit better before they were thrown into a situation where relying on each other might be a matter of life or death. Besides, she knew an amazing little restaurant along the way that would be the perfect place to pick up some takeaway for their stakeout.

Before launching into the question-and-answer session, though, she dialed Giles' number to let him know that his "unofficial field agents" had arrived safely in Willow's company. She had a few questions for him, too, about the city's museums; she vaguely remembered that he'd had a job at the British Museum before he came to Sunnydale-- which, had that had something to do with the O'Connell's?-- and figured he'd know better than she would which museums might have an Egyptology section with enough of the right kind of artifacts to serve as a backdrop for Im-hottie's resurrection. These kinds of creeps were always obsessed with choosing the "perfect atmosphere" to stage their little rituals, and it would be nice to have a line on the location ahead of time.

As it happened, Giles was indeed a font of knowledge on the subject-- enough of one that she tuned him out after the first half minute or so and pulled the cell phone away from her ear, staring at it with a glazed expression. Then she blinked and turned the Resolve Face, Pleading Edition, on Mrs. O'Connell. The whole subject was pretty much Greek to her; she'd been forced to pick up a little Greek by osmosis, living with her increasingly polyglot sister, but not enough to speak it or understand a rapid-fire conversation. As far as she was concerned, mummy this and pharaoh that were pretty much the same thing-- she only knew enough about it to get herself in trouble.

The former librarian had obviously been listening to Buffy's side of the conversation, or lack thereof. She smiled at the Slayer and held her hand out for the phone, dark eyes dancing with laughter, then dove right into conversation with the Watcher, striking up what sounded like a lively argument over whether the number of mummies in this-and-such location outweighed the religious artifacts at another.

Buffy just shook her head at the one-sided, animated chatter. It was clear they'd lost Evy for the next several minutes, so she dropped back to walk next to Rick, eyeing the ex-legionnaire with almost as much curiosity as he was eyeing her back. "So," she said brightly, breaking the ice. "How'd you get involved in the world-saving business in the first place? All Giles told me was that Evy was a librarian, and you used to be a soldier."

Rick smiled wryly at that. "Depends who you ask," he replied, shrugging casually. "As far as I ever knew, the first time I ran into anything you might call supernatural was when my entire garrison decided to march half way across Libya into Egypt to find the legendary lost city of Hamunaptra, where a rich pharaoh had supposedly buried all his treasure. All we found when we got there, though, was sand and blood. Only two of us made it out of there alive, Beni because he was a gutless coward and me because the sand around me started moving on its own and scared off the guys attacking us."

He didn't say why the sand had been moving, but it was easy enough to guess. "Freaky," Buffy replied, wincing. "I'm guessing you didn't go back to being a soldier after that?" For all the horrifying situations she'd found herself in during her time as a Slayer, she didn't think she'd ever lost that many people all at once.

He shook his head. "Nope. I was one of the officers, and showing up in Libya again without any of my men after marching off without orders didn't sound like much fun. Besides, after what I'd seen-- well. Let's just say I went a little crazy for a while." He smiled at that, but it wasn't like the welcoming grin he'd flashed her when they were trading introductions-- there was a devil-may-care quality to it and a glint in his blue eyes that said, plain as an enchanted map, 'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.'

Buffy's stomach flipped a little as he pushed yet another of her "attractive bad boy with tragic past turned immortal hero" buttons with that little speech. Of _course_ all the good ones-- the actual good ones, as opposed to the vampires she kept falling for-- were already taken. She glanced over at Evy again, feeling just the teensiest bit jealous, and asked, "So tell me, how does a crazy man hook up with a librarian?"

"He gets lucky?" he replied, chuckling. "Actually, her brother Jonathan stole an artifact from me in a casbah a few years later. She figured out where it came from and tracked me down in jail, then promised the jailor a share in any treasure we found if he'd let me go. He took her up on it, and the rest just kind of happened along the way. By the time we left Hamunaptra, she'd already talked me into coming back to England with her, and the rest is history."

Literally, Buffy thought, adding numbers in her head. They'd been together for almost eighty years; the only other couple she'd ever known with that kind of longevity was the deadly ex-duo of Spike and Drusilla. "Do I want to know what you were doing in prison in the first place?" she asked, wryly.

"I had a good time?" he replied, flippantly, dodging the question. "Thus ended my criminal career."

"And began your supernatural-fighting one," Buffy replied, steering the conversation back toward its original topic. "At least it started out fun for you. With me it was all, here catch this knife, now take this stake and go kill vampires; I was pretty terrified."

"Yup," Rick nodded. "That trip to Hamunaptra might have been the last adventure for us, though, if Evy hadn't turned out to have a hell of a lot more history with Imhotep than we thought. When Hafez dug him up again in 1933, we got dragged right back into the whole mess."

Buffy wrinkled her brow a little at that. "So both of you had connections to the supernatural you didn't know about?" she asked, remembering all the unlikely "coincidences" that tended to happen to her and the people around her. "Did you ever find out if there was some kind of prophecy involved?"

He blinked at that, some of the good-natured spark fading out of his eyes. "What do you mean?" he asked, cautiously.

Prophecy, check, she thought. So it _wasn't_ just the Slayers and those who traveled in their circles that got jerked around that way by the Powers. "You said, as far as _you_ knew Hamunaptra was the first time you ran into anything supernatural," she replied, reasonably. "Which means someone else would say differently. But you just said _Evy_ had connections she didn't know about. So it's both of you. And in our world? Coincidences like that usually aren't very coincidental."

He sighed, then reached for the ends of the cord that kept the leather bracer secured to his forearm. Underneath it was an elaborate, Egyptian looking tattoo that she didn't recognize; after he showed it to her, he immediately began lacing the bracer back on. "I've had that tattoo as far back as I can remember," he said. "I always thought it was slapped on me in the orphanage in Cairo, but the second time Imhotep woke up, our friend Ardeth-- he was the chief of the Medjai then-- saw it and told me it meant I was destined to be a warrior for God. Destined to protect Evy. I didn't believe him, of course, but some of the things we ran into after we got to Ahm Shere pretty much convinced me otherwise."

"The princess and her bodyguard," Evy said warmly, clicking Buffy's cell phone shut as she rejoined the conversation.

"Some bodyguard I was," he said softly, locking gazes with his wife. Some kind of meaning Buffy couldn't interpret passed between them; then he shook his head and nodded at the phone. "So. You and your cousin figure out where they'll be setting up?"

"More or less," she replied. "We've narrowed it down to two possible locations; discovering which it is shouldn't be much of a challenge. We'll have plenty of time to set up before they initiate the ceremony tomorrow night."

She nodded at Buffy as she said that-- but Buffy didn't reply; she'd frozen in place on the sidewalk, the word "challenge" echoing in her mind. "Oh my God," she said. "I am _such_ an idiot."

Rick and Evy stopped a few paces ahead, turning to her with worried expressions. "What's wrong?" Evy asked.

"They're not going to wait," she said, aghast. "They don't _have_ to. They might have done it already!"

They'd been pretty sure the bad guys would be using the scroll of Aberjian to bring the Mummy back; Angel had told her it would raise any dead person without the caster having to find what was left of the body first. Wolfram and Hart had used it before, to raise Darla, and since the firm got the scroll back when Angel took over the LA branch why would they re-invent the wheel? The key thing she'd overlooked, however, was that Darla had been brought back _alive_ , as she was before she'd been turned. Angel had gone through a whole challenge-y trial thing trying to keep her that way.

"But the chest--" Rick said, perplexed.

"They won't need it," Buffy replied, urgently. "I bet you anything it's a distraction, to throw you guys off. Look, the ritual we think they're using? The one that doesn't need a body first? It brings people back _alive_. So he'll be like he was before he got mummified in the first place. All they have to do is put him through that Horn Dog thing again--"

"And voila, invincible mummy," Evy said, glumly. "But in that case, why go through all the trouble to bring him back? Why not curse one of their own personnel?"

"Anubis," Rick said, tersely, staring off into the distance. "It's got to have something to do with Anubis. The last time someone wanted to off one of his champions, they used Imhotep; raising him again has the benefit of symmetry, plus there's the fact that he's an actual priest of Osiris. Not only will he have an edge against me, from the whole hating my guts thing, he'll also have an edge against anyone that's ever had dealings with Osiris, and since Osiris is the whole reason Buffy's still around..."

Evy swallowed, staring at her husband with wide, worried eyes. "We need the Book of Amun Ra, Rick. There'll be no stopping him without it."

Buffy watched both of them, a sick feeling churning in her gut. She didn't like the idea that Wolfram and Hart might have picked this mummy guy specifically to hit _both_ groups who might oppose them with the same stone. What if she hadn't overheard those guys at Paolo's, and the firm had been able to do the ritual before she even knew she was in danger? It would have been curtains for Buffy, and then they could have picked off the O'Connell's at their leisure.

"The book thing, that's how you stopped him the first time, right?" she asked. "What about the second time? The god you're the champion of, he interfered, didn't he? Won't he help us?"

Rick shook his head. "Anubis suppressed most of Imhotep's power to make sure the Scorpion guy had an equal chance of winning. That was as much as he could do without rousing Osiris' wrath-- but I doubt he'll even do that much this time. He doesn't want me as his champion; he never did. He'll probably be grateful I'm gone."

"But don't you have powers of your own?" Buffy prodded further. Her supernatural radar simply wasn't all that sensitive, not like some of the other Slayers; it had been a trade-off, Giles had speculated, for her comparatively strong gift of prophetic dreams. So if _she_ could feel him radiating power just standing there, he had to be almost Caleb-level strong.

"No." Rick sighed. "It's all or nothing; if I open that door at all, I might as well sign my soul over to the other side right now. Anubis is a god of death; he's about as moral as a hurricane, and the last time I let him in, just after Alex died..." He trailed off, and for the first time Buffy could see his true age reflected in his eyes.

Evy put a hand on his arm. "That wasn't your fault, Rick."

He drew a deep breath, then let it out again, visibly casting off the shroud of past anguish as he glanced at his wife. "Anyway," he said continued firmly, "I can't go there again. It would be almost as bad as letting Imhotep win. We'll just have to find the Book."

"Then we'd better call Willow," Buffy said grimly. "We'll have to break into Wolfram and Hart. If they don't have it, they'll know who does."

Imhotep might be powerful, but she'd faced down Glory and the First Evil in her day; as bad as things seemed now, they could do this. They could.


	4. Chapter 4

Gaining entry to the Wolfram and Hart offices in Rome was a much more difficult task for Buffy in her role as the Slayer than it would have been had she chosen to march in the front door in her other guise as the Immortal's arm-ornament. Even if that role hadn't been past its best-buy date, though, she was pretty sure she'd never be able to get the likes of Rick and Evy O'Connell through with her: the living hand of an ancient Egyptian deity, and his consort, a woman gifted with immortality by another. They'd trip the office wards even faster than she would.

Especially if the lawyers' goal really was to take down the current champion of Anubis, as they suspected. The Powers only knew who they'd try to set up in Rick's place, but it was pretty much a given that the world would be worse off for the switch. Buffy might have the Scythe now to give her a chance against beings of Caleb-level power, but she'd much prefer never having to face one ever again. Especially if it meant an ally of hers would have to die for that to happen.

A quick phone call to Willow unearthed the location of the nearest practical subterranean access, and the quickest route from there to the basements of Wolfram and Hart. The underground portions of Rome were honeycombed with more secrets than even the historians and archaeologists of the area were aware of, and the supernatural world, demonic lawyers and Watchers' Council alike, knew and used many of them.

Buffy's group would have to deal with any vampires or demons in the firm's employ who might also be using that route into the building, but aside from that, it would be fairly simple to gain entry that way unannounced. A few words of Latin would disguise their auras just enough to sneak them past the wards, since they were already set to allow a certain selection of nonhumans anyway; one of them would have to cast the spell themselves-- all Willow could do over the phone was tell them what to say-- but Evy had enough natural ability that it shouldn't be a problem.

There were too many if's and should's in the plan to make Buffy feel confident in it, but at least it was something. The idea that someone in Wolfram and Hart's control might have power over her just because Willow had invoked Osiris in her resurrection was giving her the creepy crawlies, and taking action was the best antidote she knew for that feeling. Maybe a couple of years ago she wouldn't have cared so much, but she'd finally made connections in the living world again; unnatural second life or not, she didn't want to let go of it so soon.

Could Imhotep affect Evy, too? Or would the fact that Rick had used the Book of the Dead instead of invoking Osiris directly make a difference? Buffy didn't know, and given the set of Rick's jaw, she wasn't going to ask. Regardless, the sooner they got their hands on the Book of Amun Ra, the better.

Buffy lowered herself into the tunnel system first, then pulled a glow-stick from the inner pocket of her jacket and snapped it to life. Its cold green glow lit up cobwebbed walls and a dirty stone floor, filthy enough to make her wrinkle her nose and mourn her current outfit, but at least there wasn't any slime to be seen. Behind her, she heard the O'Connells offering their thanks to the woman who'd allowed them access to the place, followed by the thuds of two more pairs of booted feet hitting the ground and the scrape of stone sealing the entrance overhead.

"This feels familiar," Rick murmured, a note of amusement in his voice.

"I know," Evy said, matter-of-factly. "Do you ever miss it?"

Buffy pulled another glow-stick from her jacket, and turned to toss it to Rick. He caught it absentmindedly in one hand without ever turning his gaze from his wife; they were locked in another of their warm, meaningful, married-person looks.

She shook her head and started down the tunnel, her emotions a mixture of annoyance and yearning. It seemed pretty unlikely, at this point, that she'd ever find a relationship like theirs for her own. That didn't stop her from wanting one, though, or mourning the loss of what she'd had, however flawed, with her two vampires.

"Miss what? Crawling around in tunnels so you could desecrate more graves?" Rick's words carried down the passageway behind her.

The sound of flesh smacking against cloth came next. "Not the archaeology. The adventure," his wife replied.

Rick chuckled. "We may not face as many deadly mummies or ancient curses these days, but I'd say we still have plenty of adventure in our lives."

A pause, then: "Mmm. Good answer."

Buffy was _almost_ far enough ahead of them to miss the soft sounds of a kiss that followed Evy's comment, but not far enough to miss the rapid fall of footsteps as the lovebirds rushed to catch up to her. A glance over her shoulder showed sheepish, but unrepentant expressions; she rolled her eyes at them, then shredded a particularly wide-reaching cobweb with her glow-stick and led their small party around a corner into a narrower maze of tunnels.

It took them most of an hour to reach their goal. Fortunately, the closer they got to the area of the city dominated by Wolfram and Hart, the brighter and cleaner the tunnels became. Buffy and Rick left their glow-sticks in a niche several hundred yards from the subterranean door into the lawyers' complex when the flickering glow of torchlight became bright enough to outshine their feeble efforts. A handful of heavily built human-faced guys in suits were posted outside the massive wooden portal, but not as many as Buffy had expected-- and no other people trying to get in.

"It must be a slow day," Buffy said, eyeing the guards' muscles as she eased the short sword out of its concealing sheath in her jacket.

"Either that, or they deliberately warned their less savory clientele not to interrupt today's proceedings," Evy added, thoughtfully.

"I hope it's door number one," Rick said, easing a gun out of its holster. "I really don't want to find out the hard way that they've changed the wards just for the occasion." Then he cocked his chin in Buffy's direction. "Hey. You think these guys are human?"

She shook her head. "I can't tell from here," she said. "Faith might be able to, but not me. I really doubt it, though. If they're guarding _this_ door, they'd need to be able to defend themselves against anything that might want to go through it."

"Well, let's find out." He narrowed his eyes, then raised his gun.

Buffy winced as a series of shots rang out in quick succession, but refused to turn her face away. She didn't want to be caught off guard just because she found gunpowder-driven weapons distasteful. The guards' attention turned toward their tunnel entrance immediately, but not quickly enough to save them from Rick's fire; they stumbled back into the wall, clutching at wounded hands and shoulders.

Then, one by one, they all shifted into game-face.

"Ah, crap," Rick scowled, then holstered his gun again and drew a sharpened stick from his pocket. "I was hoping they _were_ human." Then he charged into the fray, two steps behind Buffy. Behind them, Evy drew a pair of short, wicked, three-pronged blades from somewhere under her flowing over-shirt and charged in as well.

The struggle was fierce, but in a three-on-four battle where two of the three had superior strength and reflexes and the third was a master of her chosen weapon, it didn't take long for the human team to finish the four vampires off. Buffy, relying on her greater experience, drew two of them away, and Rick and Evy each faced down one of the remaining two. There was a bad moment early on when Evy was thrown into a wall and dropped one of her sais, which in turn distracted Rick, but both were back on form fairly quickly with only a few extra bruises to show for it. After they each finished their own target, they were able to jointly take on one of the two Buffy was dancing with and leave her free to focus on the other.

When the last vampire was finally finished, they congregated before the door, shaking dust out of their clothes.

"We gonna do this your way? Or my way?" Rick said, smirking at his wife.

"You don't have a crowbar this time, so I think we're going with my way," Evy said dryly, then sheathed her sais and reached into her pocket for the piece of paper with the words of the disguising spell Willow had dictated over the phone.

The Latinate words tingled as she spoke them; Buffy shuddered as a sudden chill walked up her spine. When the incantation finished, she took a deep breath and placed a hand on the doorknob. It opened easily, without any audible alarm or rush of guards; Buffy breathed a sigh of relief, then took a step into the hallway beyond, her short sword still naked in her hand.

The O'Connells followed suit, closing the door behind them as they entered. Then they all took a moment to examine the expanse of tile unfolding before them, and the many dark openings spaced out along either side. Willow's quick check of blueprints had told them the vault where the Book of Amun Ra was most likely kept would be at the end of the hall and behind another layer or two of security; they'd have to pierce those without outside help. In the meantime, however--

"Is that chanting?" Buffy asked, cocking her head as she listened to the faint sounds issuing from one of the rooms ahead of them.

"Sounds like it," Rick said, echoing her movement. "Five are dead, yet they live-- and then Latin--" He wrinkled his brow. " _Et illi quinque sacrificum est et illi que est mortuus vivet_."

Clearly, he'd had some experience with dead and dusty languages; she couldn't have even separated that blur of syllables into coherent words, much less repeated them. "Which means?" she asked.

"And the five shall be a sacrifice, and the one who is dead shall live," Evy said, grimly.

"You mean they're raising him right _now_?" Buffy hissed. For all that she'd been expecting the law firm to be operating on an accelerated timetable, it still came as a shock.

" _Dum vita et mors non duae res sed una sunt. In tenebris lux est, in luce tenebrae sunt_ ," Rick murmured, quoting the next line of the chant. He didn't finish it off, but Buffy could hear the final, shouted words for herself: " _Surge! Surge! Surge! Surge! Surge! Surge!_ "

An intangible pressure pushed against Buffy's skin with every repetition of the final word. Just as the incantation finished, a bright blue-white light shone around the edges of one of the doors on the left side of the hall, and an inhuman howl briefly sounded from several throats before blurring away into nothing.

"Even as life and death are not two things but one," Evy translated softly, then swallowed. "In darkness is the light, in light is the darkness. Arise! Arise! Arise!"

"Damn it," Rick growled. "We're too late."

"Not yet, we're not," Buffy said, then strode determinedly toward the door that had been lit up by the resurrection spell's effects. "Don't forget, he's _human_ right now. They still have to do the other thing, the curse. And no matter how much they can accelerate the process, they still have to mummify him first, right?"

"Right," Evy said, then took a deep, shaking breath. "But wait-- what about the book? If we interrupt what they're doing--"

"We won't have time for both," Rick concluded. "But if we can stop them now, _before_ they make him a weapon, we won't need it. We'll let the Medjai know where it is, and Ammar and Rashad will send help to get it back."

"Shh, we're here," Buffy said, raising a hand to halt their movement. Then she crept to the far side of the door, grasped the doorknob, and nudged the door open just a fraction of an inch.

Inside, a large, wooden crate stood in the middle of a five-sided star made up of colored tile. It had to be a ritual room, for there to be a permanent pentagram; no one was visible around the crate or in the small, barred windows set near the top of each side of the box itself, but her hearing picked up movement around the edges of the room and a quiet rush of near-sobbing breaths. The sobbing had to be either the caster or Imhotep himself; the other sounds had to belong to the witnesses and the caster's backup chorus. She cracked the door open a little more, peering around at all the visible figures, and finally nodded to her companions.

"No Ilona, no Paolo. I think we can take these guys."

"How many?" Rick asked, drawing his gun again.

"Seven," Buffy answered, shortly. "Ready? On one, two--"

She threw the door open, and they entered in a rush, immobilizing-- either through a strategic wound, or a good rap over the head from the hilt of Buffy's sword-- every one of the Wolfram and Hart employees in the room. Unfortunately, the one furthest away from the door-- blocked from Buffy's direct attack by a hospital bed outfitted with heavy-duty restraining straps, and a portable tray-table full of vicious-looking medical equipment-- managed to hit some kind of an alarm before he went down, and a shriek of magic went up as they approached the still-locked crate.

"This is never going to fit through the doors," Evy said despairingly, shaking her head.

"We'll have to break him out, then," Buffy decided, and nodded to her. "Can you look around on that table over there, see if you can find some kind of sedative? There should be something; I doubt they were planning to do the full-on mummy-making thing with him awake and screaming."

"You never know, with guys like this," Rick commented, frowning in distaste. Then he gripped the lock tightly with both hands, braced a boot against the crate, and _wrenched_ with all his muscular and metaphysical strength.

The quick, harsh breaths from inside the crate momentarily sped up, then slackened at Rick's activity; Buffy stepped closer as the lock sprang apart in a shriek of metal, then grabbed the filled syringe Evy tossed to her, threw the lid of the crate open, and jabbed swiftly down at the waiting flesh within.

Green-hazel eyes met dark, uncomprehending brown as she injected the sedative into a naked man's shoulder. He was completely bald, but unlike most bald guys she'd seen it enhanced, rather than detracted from, the strength of his features; but it was his eyes that had her arrested, drawing her in as she put him to sleep. The depth of pain, of betrayal staring back at her was--

His eyelids fluttered shut, and she blinked, suddenly dizzy as though she'd been released from a spell.

"No sympathizing with the enemy," she chided herself irritably, then reached into the crate to lever the resurrected priest out and over her shoulder. And blushed, as the evidence of just how naked he was swung free, mere inches from her face.

Rick chuckled, darkly, from just behind her, then wedged strong hands under Imhotep's armpits. "Here, I'll take him. He's only about an inch shorter than I am; you'll drag him on the ground trying to carry him."

"And then let's get out of here," Evy said, hurriedly. "I hear voices from the hall."

As soon as Rick had Imhotep's dead weight slung in a fireman's carry, Buffy threw the door open again and took up a rearguard position while the O'Connells snuck out behind her.

"I might have known it would be you," Ilona Costa Bianchi snarled, rushing down the hallway toward them with a small crowd of anonymous thugs on her heels. "Paolo said you would not be a threat, but I knew you would not be able to resist interfering."

Buffy snarled back, then reached into her jacket for an experimental weapon Andrew had prepared for just such an occasion-- a modified tear-gas grenade he called the "Holy Hand-grenade of Antioch" for indecipherable reasons. She threw it down, careful not to breathe in any of the holy-water-and-mace mixture that immediately erupted into the hall, then turned and ran for it, as swiftly as she could.


	5. Chapter 5

"You did _what_?" Giles interrupted Buffy's explanation, shocked. "Buffy, this is--"

"Imhotep, I know," Buffy replied, tiredly. She almost wished she hadn't called him; she'd known he was going to react this way. "Evil mummy guy, Ten Plagues of Egypt, telekinetic powers, you told me, remember? Except he's not an evil mummy right now. He's human."

Giles sighed. "And of course, Slayers don't kill humans. I can't imagine why your companions didn't act, however; they certainly aren't restrained by that stricture."

"Giles!" Buffy hissed, glancing toward the door of her bedroom, where Imhotep slumped atop the covers with a throw pillow protecting his modesty and Dawn watching over him. Rick had dumped him there unceremoniously before disappearing with his wife into the bathroom. "Look. His girlfriend's not around, and the Book of Amun Ra won't work on him right now. Maybe we can talk him around to our side. I mean, Wolfram and Hart obviously raised him to do their dirty work. You don't think that might piss him off, just a little?"

"I think that he doesn't speak any modern languages," Giles replied tartly, "and your only fluent translator on site is a woman he positively hates. Buffy, I must protest to this course of action, most strenuously."

"Objection noted," she said. "Seriously, though. We stopped them from doing the curse on him again, but they still have the Book and the scroll, and the chest with the restoration half of the curse on it's going to arrive in the morning. Evy says if their main goal is to get rid of Rick so their own Champion can call Anubis' army and take over the world, then there's nothing to stop them from putting the whammy on someone else and sending him after us. Imhotep might be a good resource for us if that happens. But even if he isn't-- we've got to do _something_ , Giles. This is going to get messy. Is there anyone else you can send me?"

"No one who can get there in the next few hours without straining Willow's abilities," he replied. "Xander is closest; it will be tomorrow evening before he can arrive. Buffy-- are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"Am I ever?" Buffy said, wryly. "Look-- Ilona saw me when we broke into Wolfram and Hart; we're going to have to leave my apartment in a few minutes if we don't want to get caught here by her minions, or Paolo's. And we have to take the naked priest guy with us unless we want them to get him back, so-- the point is kind of moot. Tell Xander that some of what's going on has to do with the tribesmen he met out in the desert, so it's totally up to him if he wants play cavalry this time. I'll take my cell phone with me if either of you need to contact me. In the meantime, we'll be getting in touch with Rick and Evy's people and asking them for help, too."

"All right," Giles said. "I trust you. Just-- be careful, all right? I know you feel a little blasé about this after defeating the likes of Glory and the First, but the threat is no less serious for its lack of originality."

"Love you too, Giles," she replied with an affectionate smile, and ended the call.

"Cavalry coming?" Willow asked hopefully as she turned back to the group.

"Just Xander, and however many guys in robes the O'Connells' great-grandson brings with him, it looks like," she said. "How's Dawn coming with the packing?"

"Done!" Buffy's sister said brightly, dragging two carry-on sized pieces of luggage out of Buffy's bedroom. "Basic necessities for both of us for a couple of days, weapons and hygiene included. You figured out where we're going yet?"

"Yeah; there's a Watcher safe-house on the other side of town," Willow replied. "Giles gave me the key to the wards, we'll be invisible there as long as we don't use any magic."

"That won't be a problem for us," Evy said, coming out of the bathroom, "but we will have to keep an eye on our guest. He was Pharoah's High Priest; he knew more incantations than any other individual in Egypt when he was alive, never mind what he might have picked up since."

Rick came out of the bathroom after her; Buffy raised her eyebrows at the slightly mussed state of their hair, but whatever else they'd been up to they'd also taken the opportunity to freshen up. Rick was wearing the same pair of jeans, but he'd changed shirts; the new one was a deep shade of blue that brought out his eyes. Evy had exchanged her layered brown shirts for a flowing black blouse; the hilts of her sais and the golden bangles on her wrists were more visible with the new ensemble.

Just looking at them made Buffy feel grimy. There wasn't time for her to do anything about that right now, though. "We need to get some kind of clothes on him before we go. I don't suppose you brought any spare boxers with you?" she asked, turning pleading eyes on Rick.

He twisted his face up in a really interesting expression at that. "Uh, sorry, no," he said. "I guess you don't exactly keep spare clothes around in his size--?"

She shook her head. "Just a bathrobe. I guess that'll have to do, though. Can you carry him again? We really need to get moving."

"Uh, Buffy?" Dawn interrupted, staring over Buffy's shoulder with wide eyes. "I don't think that's going to be necessary."

Buffy whirled to see the resurrected priest striding confidently out of her bedroom, apparently totally unconcerned about his clothesless state. All traces of the fear and confusion she'd seen earlier were gone from his eyes; every line of his body exuded confidence and power. With every stride across the carpeted floor of her apartment, he seemed to be declaring his dominance over all he surveyed.

Buffy had never been one to bow the knee, however, and especially not in her own space. She quickly moved to put herself between Imhotep and the rest of the people in the room and crossed her arms in front of her chest, projecting denial with her body language. "And just what do you think you're doing?" she asked him, sharply.

Evy made a choking sound behind her, but did not translate. That didn't matter, though; Buffy's challenge had been more about tone of voice, anyway, and a way to prompt him to say something in return.

Imhotep's lips curved in an amused smirk, and then--

\-- _For just a moment, as he opened his mouth, the world shivered around her. The walls of her apartment melted away into painted stone and beaten gold; she was no longer Buffy, American college student and Slayer, she was a nameless, foreign slave in service to a temple in ancient Egypt, bowing her head by day and sneaking out to battle the nightwalkers while her masters slept. The resonant voice rolling over her belonged not to a freshly resurrected maybe-enemy; it was the voice of her masters' god, issuing from the throat of their high priest, echoing from a nearby audience chamber. She could almost understand what he was saying_ \--

\--and then the world shivered again, and she was back in her apartment, chilled to her bones. She drew a deep breath as he continued to speak, but the sense of the words had slipped away from her.

Merrick had told her, once, that Slayers fought an eternal battle; that the dreams she had each night of girls fighting and dying in all ages and all cultures were actual memories of her prior lives. She usually didn't put much thought into it; she'd never got a clear enough glimpse of any of them to feel like they were really part of her, and Giles hadn't put much emphasis on that part of the Slayer lore. Today, though-- today, she understood what Merrick had been talking about. She'd been there. She'd _heard_ him.

He finished speaking, and she tore her gaze away from all that bronze skin and muscle to glance at Evy. "What did he say?" she asked, shaken.

"He wants to know why we have brought him back, and where Anck-su-namun is," the former librarian answered. Evy was holding her ground, refusing to back away from the man who'd twice nearly destroyed her and her family, but her eyes were a little wild. Rick stood just in front of her, one arm spread before her like a shield and a gun in his other hand, his expression fierce as he stared Imhotep down.

Evy spoke again, then, a rapid patter of unintelligible syllables as she warily answered the questions. "I've told him it wasn't us who brought him back, and that Anck-su-namun is dead," she said after a moment.

Imhotep's expression changed to a sneer of anger and disgust as he listened. He said something else rapid and harsh; Evy answered, quickly, without bothering to translate first. Imhotep narrowed his eyes at her, then nodded sharply and made another brief comment.

The world threatened to slip again as the ancient language beat against Buffy's ears; she swallowed and held the dizzying visions back by main force, using everything Willow and Giles had ever taught her about ordering her own mind. It was maddening, the way everything Evy and the priest were saying _almost_ made sense-- but this was definitely not a good time for her to be losing control of herself.

"Honey?" Rick prompted, as the conversation finally came to a halt.

Evy sighed. "I told him about Wolfram and Hart, and why we think they called him back. He isn't happy about that. He's even less pleased about the idea of working with us, but I've promised that none of us will try to attack him while all of this is going on, and he's willing at least to come with us for the time being."

"Are we _really_ sure this is a good idea?" Rick asked, still in his guarding stance.

"There's evil, and then there's evil," Buffy replied, softly, staring at the sour curve of Imhotep's mouth. "There's the insane, hates-all-things-living kind of evil, and if he was that kind of evil, it would definitely be a bad idea to keep him around. But the other kind, the kind that paves the road to hell with the best intentions-- you said everything he did was because of his girlfriend, right?"

She remembered the pain and betrayal she'd seen in his gaze, in those first few seconds after his resurrection. That kind of pain only lived in the hearts of those who'd loved unwisely; she'd seen it, to her shame, in Spike's eyes more than once during the worst months of their dysfunctional relationship.

"Right," Evy replied.

"Then unless they bring her up next, I think we're safer keeping him than killing him," Buffy said, decisively.

"All right, then," Rick replied, then slowly put his gun away. "If he kills us all, though, I swear I'm coming back to haunt you."

"Understood," Buffy said dryly, then ripped her attention away from Imhotep again to glance at her sister. "Dawnie, bathrobe?" she said pointedly, raising her eyebrows.

Dawn blushed; she was standing off to one side where she had a very good view of the resurrected priest's naked backside. "Sure, um-- just a second," she said, and edged over to the bathroom.

Willow took the robe from Dawn as the younger girl emerged with it, then visibly steeled her nerves and approached Imhotep with it. "Here," she said, thrusting it at the priest.

Imhotep gave the garment an incredulous look, then turned a querying expression to Evy. There was another brief exchange of words; then Imhotep took the robe from Willow's hands with a grimace and put it on.

With the robe wrapped around him-- an oversized, worn thing Buffy had borrowed from Giles the last time she'd been in London and had kept as a sort of security blanket-- he looked unexpectedly human, as though the power of plaid had somehow dampened his aura. Buffy smiled briefly at the thought, then moved to grab the suitcases Dawn had packed and gestured meaningfully toward the door of the apartment. "Time to go," she said.

Willow and Dawn moved first; Buffy watched them go, then jerked her chin at Imhotep. She didn't want to turn her back to him, and she was pretty sure the O'Connells wouldn't either.

He frowned at her, but any other response he might have given was cut off by Dawn's gasp from the open doorway. He turned immediately to stare in her direction; Buffy did, too, dropping the suitcases again as she hurried to her sister's side.

"They moved fast this time," she said sourly, staring at the crowd of suits approaching her front door. Night had fallen before they'd emerged from the tunnels; it was anybody's guess whether those minions were humans, demons, or vampires like the ones they'd destroyed at Wolfram and Hart's subterranean entrance. "Willow, you think you can zap us to the safehouse directly?"

"Not if you want me to be any use tomorrow," Willow replied, backing away from the door to give Buffy more room. "I used a lot of magic 'porting the three of us in this morning; moving twice as many people so soon will be a huge additional strain, unless I start pulling from sources I shouldn't."

Buffy thought about that for a moment, then slammed the door in the minions' faces, darted back across the living room, and threw open her weapons chest. There were several short swords amid that tangle of metal; she hefted a couple of them in her hand, then grabbed the one that felt most "right" to her and turned to Imhotep with a grim frown.

He stared at her, then the sword, with an absolutely blank expression; she locked gazes with him for a moment, trying to impress on him the seriousness of the moment, then reversed the sword and held it out to him, hilt-first.

"Buffy, what are you doing?" Rick asked, cautiously.

"Tell him the guys outside work for the people who brought him back," she said, ignoring the question. "Tell him he's not allowed to harm anyone else-- but anybody working for Wolfram and Hart is fair game. Tell him if he agrees to that, he can have this sword."

"And you think he'll pay any attention to your rules once he has the sword in hand?" Rick added, incredulously.

"I know I can take it away from him if he doesn't," Buffy replied, firmly.

Before Rick could continue his objections, Evy took a deep breath, then repeated the instructions Buffy had listed out in Ancient Egyptian.

Buffy knew the moment Imhotep understood by the fierce light that suddenly ignited in his eyes. He bared his teeth in a predatory grin, then took the hilt of the sword from her hand.

"We probably could take them without his help, you know," Evy hissed.

"I know," Buffy replied. "But I'm pretty sure he's not going to turn on us yet, and more is always better in fights like these."

"It's the _yet_ that concerns me," Rick said, with a frown.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Buffy shook her head. "For now-- let's just make sure we get out of here in one piece."

The front door shattered open, and the battle began.


	6. Chapter 6

The first few seconds of combat passed in a blur of sound and motion. Buffy knew she and the others were going to have to break free of their attackers on foot, luggage and all, if they hoped to make it to their refuge undetected-- and that meant taking down every last one of them. Someone on Ilona's team had been smart, though, and had sent the one type of being guaranteed to make it past a Slayer's spidey-sense and witchy demonic wards both: ordinary mortal humans.

Well... ordinary- _ish_. About as ordinary as Xander was, in the strictly 'nonmagical' understanding of the term. If they were actual norms they would never have been a threat in the first place. Even the front-row cannon fodder-- the handful of soldiers who made it first to the door-- were holding their own against Evy's and Imhotep's blades, filling the air with sparks and the sounds of metal clashing against metal. Rick's first few shots didn't do much good against the body armor they were apparently wearing under their shirts, either; when he paused to reload and adjust his aim for trickier head or limb shots, Buffy unsheathed her own sword and charged toward the damaged doorway.

A hail of automatic weapons fire drove her back. She ducked away from the splinter-framed opening as quickly as she could, swearing at the blaze of pain that carved a track across the outer skin of her shoulder. The other bullets struck the building like a swarm of angry supersonic bees; a few more buzzed by her ear, barely missing the entangled fighters to stitch abstract patterns across the far wall of the living room.

"Willow!" Buffy called, breathing deeply in an effort to suppress her instinctive fear. Some part of her hindbrain had never forgotten her near death experience at Warren's hand. It was hard enough to fake calm around a gun in the hands of an ally these days; facing down hostile weapons fire was an entirely unbalance-y situation, and it was something she would have to get over _quick_ if she ended up facing more enemies like Ilona in the future.

"On it!" Willow sounded out of breath, though luckily not too tired to work witchy wonders: the next spate of bullets spanged backward, repelled by a curtain of violet energy. The ricocheted fire provoked some pretty foul language from their assailants; Buffy didn't speak much Italian, but the tone of voice was fairly universal.

"Perfect!" She clenched her empty fist and turned back toward the doorway.

Sometime in the last few seconds, Imhotep had dispatched his opponents and snuck up beside her. A faint sheen of sweat glistened on the smooth bronzed skin of his scalp, not to mention _other_ parts, barely shielded by the haphazardly tied bathrobe. Buffy swallowed, then tracked her gaze back to his face, and tried to get a handle on his mood. He seemed... furious, but turned outward, not inward, she decided; it looked as though she'd made the right call with him.

...Unless, of course, he intended to kill them _all_ and let Osiris sort them out. Buffy winced at the thought. They'd just have to take that risk, though. Imhotep had to realize he wouldn't be able to run free in the modern world without _someone_ to run interference, and so far as he'd know she and the O'Connells were the only people with the right mix of magical and mundane knowledge to help him.

He glared out through the impromptu shield for a long moment, giving no further cues one way or the other. Then he turned his head toward Willow and made a quelling gesture, lifting a hand in the air and lowering it again palm downward. Willow blinked at him, brow furrowed, then glanced toward Buffy for confirmation; Buffy abruptly remembered what Evy had said about him knowing magic, and gave a cautious nod. Hopefully she'd guessed right about his meaning-- and his intentions.

Imhotep turned a smug, sardonic look toward her then. It wasn't quite grateful; more as though he were pleased she was rightfully acknowledging his superiority, with an undercurrent of bitterness that her approval had been required in the first place. Then the curtain fell, and he lifted a hand from his sword hilt to thrust imperiously toward the doorway. Stentorian Egyptian words poured from his throat, followed by a howl of wind outside; the intermittent popping sounds of gunfire testing the shield's endurance gave way to a cacophony of crashing noises and swearing.

"Don't tell me he just did the face-in-the-wind thing," Rick muttered from behind them. "I hate that trick. I thought he could only do it when he was a mummy!"

Evy sighed next to her husband as Buffy leaned over again to peer out at the damage. "He could do it much more easily when he was a mummy," the librarian said, "but he can evidently achieve the same effect with the magic still at his command."

And how. "I think he's cleared the street," Buffy told the others, trying to ignore the growing realization that she'd taken a heavyweight tiger by the tail. Giles and the O'Connells had _tried_ to warn her, after all. She still didn't see how she could have chosen any other path, though; whatever consequences she might face for her decision to free him, she'd have to worry about them later. "Get moving! We'll make sure they stay down."

Imhotep lifted his hand again and made a brushing motion, long fingers sweeping fluidly from side to side. He was too intense, too large a presence to really call _graceful_ , but there was an inherent sensuality to his every movement that made Buffy shift uncomfortably. In the street, a brief rallying volley of gunfire was quickly cut off by another series of heavy thuds, and she wrinkled up her nose.

The soft smack of flesh against stone was not among Buffy's favorite battle noises-- it always meant _ew, gross_ and frequently heralded longer laundry sessions-- but in this case, it was music to her ears. More so than the distant-but-growing sound of sirens, anyway; _that_ was a complication they seriously didn't need.

" _We?_ " Dawn asked, crouched against the near wall with the suitcases.

She threw Dawn an ironic eyebrow. "We," she repeated firmly, gesturing toward her proof of concept.

"Point," Dawn sighed, eyeing the exposed expanse of Imhotep's thighs again.

"Go, go!" Buffy urged her, blushing irritably at her sister's speculative expression, then turned to the others. "Rick, Evy, you first; Willow behind them, and keep that curtain ready-- there might be some guns still out there. Dawn, follow Willow; we'll be right behind you."

She stood up and laid a hand on Imhotep's shoulder as she rattled out the orders, tugging him slightly back as the others went by. She could feel the fine tremor in the muscle under her palm, but the glance he shot her was as fiery as before: still thoroughly eager for battle. It was no wonder he creeped the O'Connell's out, if he managed that level of intensity even when he _wasn't_ a mummy. What must he have been like back in his heyday? From what she'd heard so far-- the mental image raised the fine hairs on the backs of Buffy's arms.

Whatever he'd been before, though, he was _her_ muscle for the time being. It wasn't as though he'd be the first ex-monster she'd ever had on her team, and he hadn't given her any reason to distrust him-- _yet_. Odds were high for personal pain as a result of taking on yet another super-powered work in progress; but also for world-saveage, and world-saveage was what mattered at the moment.

Dawn finally stepped over the splintery threshold, last duckling in the line, and Buffy gave one final glance around the room. She'd hate to lose the apartment, but everything in it was replaceable; all the important items were either in the suitcases, secured in her magical safe, or back in her room at Council Headquarters. Wolfram and Hart were sure to ransack it after this, but they'd need either her blood or Dawn's to crack the safe, and if things got that bad.... Well, that was enough of that depressing line of thought.

The street outside was narrow and unnaturally dim, but there was still enough light to see the sprawled forms of unconscious thugs everywhere. There weren't even any cars to hide behind; she didn't know if it was the hour or if the roads had been blocked somewhere, but there wasn't any traffic in the neighborhood, and the walls of the apartment building across from hers were practically close enough to jump the street from window to window, so there wasn't room for any parked vehicles, either. Not at all like the neighborhood she'd grown up in back home. There weren't even any alleys near her front door, the way the buildings were pressed all chock-a-block together, and Buffy felt strangely exposed as she followed the others up the street. Like an ant under a magnifying glass.

Not even the solid presence at her side could calm her nerves as her eyes skittered over the fallen forms of the enemy, watching for movement. It was a toss-up whether the tunnels would be any safer for them at night than staying in the apartment would have been, but maybe if they could get somewhere better lit-- without being cornered by the polizia-- they'd have a chance at making it across town.

Yeah, or maybe not. A bunch of obvious foreigners without guides or transportation, including one guy in a bathrobe? Buffy wasn't holding her breath. But there wasn't much chance they'd be able to call a taxi or get on the subway in the state they were in without attracting _some_ kind of negative attention, Wolfram and Hart or otherwise. She bit her lip, and kept hurrying, turning fragmented plans over in her thoughts. Stupid Paolo. Why couldn't he have stayed just _passively_ evil? It was just starting to sink in how very pampered she and her sister had been, these last few months in Rome.

"Willow--" she started to call out to the front of the group, to ask where the next tunnel entrance was.

A cry of dismay cut off the rest of her sentence, followed by an "Oh, dear" from Evy that ratcheted her nerves up another notch. Evy was definitely Giles' cousin; Buffy had never met anyone else who could make those words sound quite so much like asterisk-worthy foul language.

"They found us!" Dawn called, stumbling to a halt with the luggage. Evy and Rick took station on either side of her, Willow beside them, hands still raised to hold the shield.

"What did they do, call up every demon in the city?" Buffy asked, staring past the small group at the horde filling the street just beyond them. Some of the minions had guns, but others showed evidence of non-human features-- which she totally should have been expecting, now that they'd been forced to leave the apartment's wards behind them.

"Willow, teleport, now!" she screamed, resheathing her sword and jutting out a hand to summon the Scythe to her. She tried not to use the Slayer-specific weapon more than she had to-- it was scarily obvious to anyone with magical senses, like a sharp-edged beacon-- but this was really looking like a bigger-hammer situation.

Willow shot a glance back at Buffy, visibly upset. "Buffy, I can't! If I do that I won't be any good to you tomorrow!"

"I know, _I know_! We don't have a choice. Dawn, go with her; Rick and Evy, protect them!"

"Buffy--!!" Dawn objected, expression indignant; the O'Connell's didn't look any more pleased with the situation, but Buffy really, really needed them to not be there. _Someone_ needed to be free and in one piece to greet the cavalry in the morning, and these guys had caught them seriously unprepared.

She clenched her hands around the haft of the Scythe. Beside her, taking his cue from her posture, Imhotep raised his hands, sword in one and a swirl of wind and dust gathering in the other. One of the enemy group let out a mocking laugh as swords were drawn and guns were readied-- and in that breath of a moment, Willow firmed her jaw, raised her hands, and blazed like a small, intensely white sun.

The light died out. Spots flickered in the field of Buffy's vision. There was a short, disbelieving pause as the combatants registered the sudden disappearance of the four who'd stood between them-- and then the foot-soldiers _moved_ , and Buffy let go the rein on her instincts.

She barely noticed any details of the next few minutes on a conscious level. It was like the good days of fighting beside Spike, or the short stretches of time she and Faith had been on good terms; she hadn't been expecting it, but the Slayer in Buffy exhilarated in the companionship of another predator of equal strength, and she stopped registering anything but the sensations of the moment as she moved. Even with Giles' bathrobe fluttering ridiculously around him where the tie had given way, Imhotep was an effortlessly strong presence at her side, and together they dodged and danced through their opponents.

She whirled swiftly from attacker to attacker, taking them one at a time: flattening a human with the side of the axe-like blade, then whirling to stab the demon following him in the chest with the pointy end of the haft. Near her, other opponents went down in sprays of blood and choked-off moans, one after another, before she could even register them as threats. She was vaguely aware of more guns held in threatening postures, but Imhotep did something to yank them out of the shooters' hands and hurl them several dozen yards up the street before more than a handful of bullets were fired.

She moved on, and on, and on. At one point a burning sensation streaked across the muscle of her outer thigh, but in her single-minded state she barely registered more than _damn, Slayed another pair of leather pants!_ as she separated a Fyarl's head from its shoulders. There'd be time to catalogue wounds later.

The sounds of sirens grew louder as they fought. Windows scraped somewhere above them; a door opened on one side of the street, then slammed again with an exclamation. People were _noticing_ , but still the footsoldiers came, fighting more and more recklessly as the seconds passed-- and it was hard not to see that while they weren't shy about trying to kill _Buffy_ , every attack aimed at Imhotep was designed to disable.

 _He'd_ certainly realized. Buffy caught a glimpse of his intent, frowning expression out of the corner of her eye after they'd downed the first dozen or so enemy, just before he backed off, putting a few feet of clear cobbles between him and the fighters. Buffy swung the Scythe wide, trying desperately to cut herself some room as her living shield disappeared, but before she had time to do more than gasp in dismay he thrust the fingers of his free hand toward the earth and _spoke_.

As engaged as the Slayer in her was, this time there was no fighting the overlap. Recent memories melted into old and swallowed her senses whole: for a brief, bright moment, as the High Priest behind her _commanded_ , she could almost feel the sand under her bare feet as she lifted the gods' weapon to strike at the minions of Apep before her.

"Collect your bones!" the priest called, as she wheeled to kick one demon in the groin and parry the blade of another. "Gather your limbs! Shake the earth from your flesh! Your Master is here!"

The ground moved; the priest staggered as though winded, his tanned flesh graying slightly with the effort required to channel the gods' will. Four patches of cobblestone burst upward, and the nameless one immediately dropped to her knees, pressing her forehead to the street. An arid wind swept overhead, clogging her nostrils like the breath of the grave; and then-- and then--

Buffy gasped and sat up, shaking slightly as the mindset of the ancient Slayer lost traction, and opened her eyes on a scene of slaughter. Whatever it was Imhotep had called up, they'd taken out the rest of the Wolfram and Hart troops without hardly _trying_. And they were still _there_.

She turned to give her companion an alarmed glance. He raised an eyebrow at her and gestured sharply; at his command, the four war-clad mummies moved closer, forming around them like a squad of creepy bodyguards. Then he staggered, nearly crumpling with the effort.

Buffy hastily ducked her shoulder under his arm as her own wounds began to complain, then dragged him toward the far side of the street. The mummies moved with them; they made her skin crawl, though she had to admit they might be useful if they had to hole up in the tunnels 'til sunrise. There was no way to make it to the safehouse without undoing the diversion they'd just created. And after that--

"Buffy," Imhotep murmured, as though tasting her name on his tongue.

Buffy shivered. Worry about the morning later; first, they had to survive the night.


	7. Chapter 7

Buffy leaned against the worn brick of a tall apartment building for several long breaths, trying to scrape together enough energy to figure out what to do next.

Well, she _knew_ what she needed to do next: get somewhere out of sight. Willow had-- if all had gone well-- transported Dawn and the O'Connells to the safehouse, but she wouldn't be able to come back for Buffy, and without a few hours to rest and sunlight to keep off the worst of the nasties the odds weren't very good for Buffy to make it there on foot. Her backup was practically dead on his feet, _his_ mummified backup way too conspicuous to take through the streets, and now that her adrenaline was fading she wasn't too happy about her own state of readiness, either. Between the bullet graze on her shoulder, the long sword slice along her thigh, and a collection of other small scrapes and bruises, she would need a few hours flat on her back to heal.

And what about Imhotep? He'd straightened enough to take all his weight on his own two feet again, but he still looked unnaturally worn and pale, braced against the wall at her side. She tilted her head back for a measuring look and met frustrated exhaustion in his dark eyes. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it was going to stay locked up in his head unless it was very simple or else he was really good at charades, and with three thousand years of cultural differences between them _that_ was an iffy prospect. Stupid language barrier.

Unless.... No. She frowned and pushed away from the wall again, pointing toward one of the downed thugs who looked to be approximately Imhotep's size. There was no point even _considering_ trying to actively use those past Slayer memories that kept popping up around him; the last thing she needed to do was risk losing herself to the past when the fate of the world might depend on what happened in the next couple of days.

Imhotep grunted, then nodded reluctantly and stalked over to the body. It was one of the humans Buffy had taken down, heavily bruised where she'd clobbered him with the flat of the Scythe but still breathing. The approaching sirens told her there wasn't enough time to strip him fully, or search the others for useful gear, but there was at least enough time to roughly remove his boots and dark jeans and hand them over to replace the useless bathrobe still dangling from Imhotep's shoulders.

He wrinkled his nose in a sneer at the snug fit of the jeans and the loose, probably completely unfamiliar feel of the boots, but put them on without complaint. When she made to remove the dark turtleneck as well, though, he pointed toward the approaching glint of headlights on the windows down a curve in the street, and she hastily dropped the discarded bathrobe over the groin of the guy they'd robbed. Imhotep took up his sword again, then placed a commanding hand on the back of her shoulder, and Buffy lurched into motion, pausing only to scoop up the tactical belt she'd removed with the thug's jeans. She didn't have a flashlight on her, so the enemy's would have to do.

She'd almost forgotten about their escort during their quick wardrobe upgrade, but Imhotep hadn't. As they hurried in the direction of the private catacomb entrance she remembered from earlier that day, he lifted an imperious hand. The four mummies turned as one, then immediately bounded up the side of the closest building as though they were filled with helium under those dusty old wrappings.

So much for conspicuous! As long as they stayed up the z-axis where most people didn't think to look and didn't make much noise, there was a chance they might go unnoticed. And now that the former High Priest wasn't flashing all and sundry either, Buffy and their boss might even have a chance at staying anonymously in the shadows. She gave a tired sigh of relief as she finished buckling on the belt, then grabbed Imhotep's hand without even thinking about it and hurried faster, pulling him along.

They were stumbling with exhaustion by the time they reached their destination, and had attracted more than their fair share of amused looks from the sparse foot traffic along the way. Buffy was pretty sure they'd managed to pull off 'drunken evening out', though, rather than some more sinister impression. A little breaking and entering later-- and one unfortunate homeowner knocked out before she could get a good look at her invaders-- and they were home free.

For certain values of 'home' and 'free', anyway. Buffy closed off the catacomb entrance again with shaking hands, and wondered just how long it would be before the Council ally woke up and reported the incident back to HQ. Long enough that Wolfram and Hart wouldn't be able to intercept and use the call to track them, Buffy hoped; but probably soon enough to soothe Giles' worry if they didn't manage to report in before dawn. She'd have used her cell phone to call from the street, but she'd had plenty of lectures from Andrew on how secure those things _weren't_ , and without Willow there to actively obscure the call with a spell she'd decided the risk wasn't worth it.

Imhotep murmured a question to her in the dark, and she hastily fumbled the flashlight from the tactical belt. The rough walls, cobwebs, and visible trickles of dust from the low ceiling seemed somehow more ominous than they had with Rick and Evy at her side, laughing about past adventures. She aimed the beam toward an alcove she remembered a short distance down, and Imhotep sent two of the mummies a little past it to stand on guard. The other two waited until he and she had stepped into the tight niche-- a little smaller than the bathroom of her apartment-- then took up position facing the way they'd come. It was unnatural, the way they froze in place with weapons raised; but no more unnatural, she supposed, than they already were to begin with. She shuddered, then cautiously lowered herself to the ground and shifted her weight to her off hip to get a good look at her slashed thigh.

Her companion settled down next to her with a frown, then reached to cautiously frame the wound in the vee of one hand and gave her a questioning look. Buffy wasn't sure what exactly he was asking, but whatever he wanted to know, she figured her answer would be the same. She wouldn't accept healing from him, as tired as he was, and it wouldn't slow her down regardless-- not after she'd had a chance to rest. She shook her head at him, then pointed toward the ground and made the 'pillow' gesture with two palms pressed together and a sideways-tilted head.

He snorted, but gave her a grave nod again, and made the same series of gestures back to her. Without clean water and bandages there wasn't much she could do about her wounds that Slayer healing wouldn't take care of on its own, so Buffy reluctantly nodded, then stretched out, trying to find a position that wasn't inherently uncomfortable on the uneven floor. She was so gross already, a little more dirt in the hair surely wouldn't matter; but Slayer or not, she was used to soft mattresses and sweet-smelling sheets. It would be a miracle if--

She yawned, eyes drifting shut as shuffling sounds followed Imhotep's attempts to settle at her side.

* * *

The next sound to enter Buffy's awareness was hardly a sound at all: the low, rumbling susurrus of an incoming tide was more a feeling in her bones than something heard with the ears as she stood on a curve of California road overlooking the moonlit Pacific Ocean.

She could see a car parked nearby; not one she recognized, its lights on but no driver behind the wheel. It occurred to her vaguely as she studied it that her last conscious memories were of a place halfway around the world; but for some reason, she felt more worried about the car's owner than herself.

"Pretty, isn't it?" said a familiar voice at her ear.

Buffy nodded absently, turning her attention back to the dark sweep of calm sea. "I spent most of my teenage years wishing I was anywhere but here; but I do miss it sometimes, now that I'm gone."

"Mmmm," the other woman mused. "I never did get away, not after Mom and Dad abandoned me. But I don't regret it much. Not that part, at least."

Buffy pursed her lips at that. "What do you regret, then?"

Shoulders shrugged in the corner of her vision, long dark hair sweeping forward with the movement. "Not paying attention to the important things, mostly. Not taking the right chances when I should have, and taking the wrong chances without looking twice."

Buffy turned to look at her, then, meeting serious eyes in a softly glowing face. Cordelia looked more beautiful than Buffy remembered from high school, backlit by a faint white glow, but she otherwise looked the same as ever: no white robes, no ostentatious gold harp. "Why are you telling me this?" she asked, then hastened to add, "I mean, why _you_ , not why tell. Not that I'm not glad to see you, but the last few times the Powers that Bother sent me a message, they used Tara."

Cordy gave her a wry smile. "Call it irony," she said. "A lot of people are about to be offered choices, like a bunch of dominoes, with the future of the world at stake. The first time _I_ was given a choice, I took the power I was offered; and that ended up working out. But the second time-- I made the same choice, and the world nearly ended. Learn from me, okay? Don't stick to your rut. Think it through. I'd kinda like this view to stay just the way it is."

Buffy frowned. "Good memories?" she asked.

" _Important_ memories," Cordelia replied, firmly.

Buffy's brows drew together. Cordelia nodded, an acknowledging smile at the corners of her mouth, as the penny dropped; then her face blurred, replaced by the mud-streaked visage of the original Slayer.

"You ask the others if they ready to be strong," the other woman said, harshly. "But what about _you_?"

Buffy flinched, opening her mouth to answer angrily-- then caught herself, wondering if this might be what Cordelia had meant. She had rejected the source of the Slayer's power when she'd encountered it in the time-out-of-place accessed by the Slayer Emergency Kit; first offer, and first answer. Was Sineya making her a second offer, now? Important memories, Cordelia had said. She'd been thinking about memories earlier that day-- and rejected the idea without much thought. Had she been wrong?

"Yes," Buffy replied, staring the angry young woman down. "I'm ready."

Sineya smiled fiercely. Then she faded away again, leaving no one else behind to replace her-- and the distant whisper of the waves faded into the moaning of a desert wind.

* * *

Buffy woke with a gasp, curling closer against her firm pillow, and shivered as a warm, resonant voice murmured to her in question.

"What do you dream of?"

"Blood. Victory, and death," she mumbled automatically in reply. Then she stiffened as she realized just _who_ her pillow was-- and the fact that neither of them had spoken English.

Long-held instinct prodded at her to lurch away and abase herself in front of Pharoah's High Priest; but an equal lifetime of impertinence-- and the undertone of weariness still dragging at her mostly-renewed strength-- insisted she stay right where she was. For a moment, she wasn't sure which impulse to follow, paralyzed by the pulse of the heartbeat under her right ear.

"Mixed omens for the day to come," Imhotep said, betraying no surprise at her use of his language.

Neither, then. Buffy swallowed, then sat up slowly, clicking the flashlight back on and putting some distance between them as she looked down into his face. He looked better; his coloring wasn't as faded as she remembered, and his eyes were a lot more alert. "No duh," she said. "By now, they've probably done to someone else what they would have done to you. So you know what we'll face."

His expression darkened, hatred and old pain curdling in the downward curve of his mouth. Buffy-- as her other self-- only remembered meeting him up close once or twice in life, and she'd _never_ seen an expression like that on his face; though seeing him now, it was easier to recognize the anger in him than to imagine him with a genuine smile. The slave she'd been had heard of him as a man ambitious in the service of his god, but fully loyal to his pharaoh, who was after all a living god himself; she'd died sometime before he'd apparently followed his heart into treason, and found the fact of him as _deliberately unnamed dead_ all those years horrifying and disorienting.

Probably not more so than he had himself, though, judging by the bitterness in his voice as he sat up and spat the next word: "Hom'Dai."

"Yes," she said, carefully. "Which is why we need to go find my friends now, assuming it's light out. Including the O'Connells."

His gaze sharpened into a glare at her unspoken question, undercut with some uglier emotion that she couldn't quite name. "I gave my word to Nefertiri," he said. "I will honor it."

"And after the guys who brought you back again are gone?" Buffy pressed.

He snarled, eyes flashing. "Anck-su-namun ran from me, and failed the test of Ma'at. There is nothing left for me in this world, or any other."

Not an answer, in the strictest sense. But not exactly a declaration of enmity, either. Buffy sighed, then climbed stiffly to her feet, massaging the itch out of her sore but mostly-healed thigh. "You might be surprised," she said. "I felt that way once. Twice, even. And I'm still here."

Here, she meant, as in Earth; but also here, as in fighting the good fight. She pointed at the ground, then raised her eyebrows at Imhotep, still emoting in broad, communicative strokes despite the unexpected acquisition of a common language.

He snorted at the gesture. "Here _again_ , perhaps; I sense the touch of Osiris on you, khat and ka alike."

The last two words jammed up in her brain a little, translating poorly between modern self and older. Something like body, both tangible and intangible? Her physical self, and the self that lived on, but not quite the thing associated with the word 'soul'? Which part-- presumably-- had been in whatever white, warm Heaven she'd mostly forgotten. Well, if she still needed any confirmation that the choice of Imhotep as avatar had been aimed at her as much as Rick and Evy, that would have covered it.

She looked away. "My friend petitioned him to let me cross back," she said. "As a warrior of the people. I promised not to let my second chance go to waste."

He was silent for a long moment; then she heard him shifting slowly to his feet and stepping closer to her. "Warrior of the people," he murmured thoughtfully, and she felt the touch of callused fingertips under her chin, coaxing her face back up. "I have heard that phrase before."

She cleared her throat, flushing a little at the touch, then let her eyes meet his again. He didn't remember her for her past self, she could tell; the rising curiosity in his gaze was too impersonal for that. She'd been unimportant in the hierarchy of the temple, after all, noticeable only for her exotic foreign looks, though her hair had been paler then and her skin several shades duskier with sun. And the beings she'd fought had been the domain of evil Apep or sometimes dark Anpu-- Apophis and Anubis-- not the King of the Underworld; not the High Priest's responsibility. But she didn't doubt he'd heard stories.

Everyone always heard stories. It was just that so few people believed the truth behind them.

"Warrior for _my_ people," she said, stubbornly, "so we'd better get moving, if you're ready."

"My strength will return more fully with the setting sun," he replied, finally dropping his hand, though his gaze did not waver. "I have not spent my strength so recklessly in millennia; but I am well enough to move under the sun, if this disguise is-- sufficient."

Sufficient; that was one word for it, Buffy thought, caught off guard by the phrase. She eyed him again: sockless feet in slightly oversized boots, tight dark jeans crammed into their tops. No shirt. Slight smudges under intense eyes, and acres of smooth skin over firm muscle. Ancient awe and modern irreverence warred again; this time, Buffy firmly won. Hello, salty goodness.

She smirked at him. "Close enough."

Then she turned and walked out into the main tunnel, where the mummified guards were conspicuous by their absence, hopefully returned to earth with the dawn. "This way, I think," she said, aiming the beam down the tunnel.

Night survived, check; now, to rejoin the others.


	8. Chapter 8

"Buffy! You're here!" Delight suffused Dawn's face as she opened the door to the weary fighters.

Buffy knew she was a mess; Imhotep might have had some kind of magic dirt-repelling powers for all _he_ looked like he'd spent a night under the city, but her hair felt tangled and matted, her jacket was wrinkled and dirty from substituting as a blanket, she had at least two bloody slashes in her clothes, and she didn't even want to think about the state of her day-old makeup. Raccoon eyes were probably the least of it. Dawn didn't seem to have noticed any of that, though; she just lunged as Buffy stepped through the door of the safe house and wrapped her arms around her as far as they would go.

She spoiled the welcome a moment later though, pulling back with a gagging noise and wrinkling her nose in exaggerated disgust. "Eugh, where did you sleep last night? The catacombs? You _reek_. And what's in your _hair_?" She reached up to pluck at Buffy's bangs, then gave a little shriek and shook her fingers violently, trying to dislodge whatever had transferred with the contact.

Buffy chuckled a little at her sister's comically alarmed expression, then stepped aside to let Imhotep enter behind her. Truthfully, she was pretty creeped herself to see what had been in her hair all night-- but a warm shower would take care of the problem as soon as she could find a bathroom, and teasing Dawn _almost_ made the ick factor worth it. "Did you know cobwebs look _just like lace_ when they're thick enough? Weren't you just talking about doing some redecorating on the cheap?"

"Oooh, don't _even_ ," Dawn shuddered, slapping at her arm. Then her gaze shifted to the bare-chested man standing behind Buffy, and she seemed to lose all her brain cells once more.

"So, he's still with you, huh? Did he do more cool magic stuff?" she asked, all affected nonchalance as she practically drooled over the guy. Shades of Spike; if Buffy had ever needed any proof Dawn had been made from her, her reactions to each quasi-evil guy co-opted to their side would have sufficed. "And how come _he's_ got new clothes and _you're_ still all eau de fight before?"

A pang of hot, possessive _something_ twitched in Buffy's chest at her sister's behavior, and she squelched it in a hurry. Before her nighttime conversation with Cordelia and the First Slayer-- and the three thousand year old memories she'd accepted as a result-- she'd probably have blown off Dawn's leering with a roll of her eyes and snarked right back. In the clear light of morning, though, she was suddenly clenching her hands to stop herself from putting the disrespectful, trespassing _child_ in her place; it shook Buffy, and made her wonder just how far the Old Kingdom Slayer's personality had already integrated with her own. Something she probably ought to talk to Giles about later.

"It wasn't exactly your favorite negozio," she said, dryly. "Let's just say none of the things attacking us were women."

Dawn dragged her attention away from Imhotep with a sigh, eyeing the rent in the thigh of Buffy's pants again. "I _don't_ think I want to know," she said, "though I'm pretty sure _anything_ would have been an improvement. I hope you didn't attract any oogly-boogly attention on your way over. Willow's still out like a light, and you guys look like you need at least a shower and breakfast before you're ready to bust evil's chops again."

"Tell me about it," Buffy sighed, then narrowed her eyes at her. "Who's cooking? Not you, I hope."

"Ha, ha." Dawn rolled her eyes. "The O'Connells are; they went out at sunrise for more gear and food." She shrugged. "I guess their grandkid's supposed to be here in a couple of hours? Rick said he was going to fry something, and Evy's cutting fruit. Want I should put some coffee on?"

" _Please_ ," Buffy said. Then she reached out to lay a hand on Imhotep's arm, aware of the way his expression had grown sourer with every word he didn't understand. "I'm going to go clean myself up," she told him, or thought she had-- she was translating from English to Ancient Egyptian and back in her head mostly by instinct, and if she thought about it too much the sense of the words slipped away from her. "I'll be back after that; and in the meantime, the O'Connell's are cooking. I know Dawn's a pest, but don't threaten her while I'm gone, okay? She's my little sister."

He snorted a little at that last, but nodded acknowledgement. "It has been millennia since I last tasted food; as long as there is no poison in the meal, I will keep my peace," he replied.

Buffy smiled at that, bemused. Not only did she have to translate from one language to another, but it seemed she was going to have to convert Formal Guy Speak to regular everyday verbage at the same time. What was that supposed to mean, 'I'm totally starving, so as long as they play nice, I will too?'

"Good," she decided. Then she raised an eyebrow at her suddenly-sputtering little sister and headed for the upstairs bath, dropping the Scythe in the hall's umbrella stand as she passed it.

She didn't think she was imagining the way his eyes lingered on her backside as she walked away. Buffy was aware she couldn't be much more to the ancient priest than a mystery at this point, despite the enforced intimacy of their introduction, but if that was going to keep him away from everyone else's throats for the time being? She was totally okay with it.

Besides, it had been a long time since she'd had more than a tepid date with Paolo, and as good as Italian food generally was it didn't make up for all the other H she'd been accumulating. It felt nice to have a powerful, dangerous man's eyes follow her with a little honest fascination. And... yeah, more than that too, though she was pretty sure the urge to genuflect was the ancient memories talking.

She sighed as she climbed the long, curving staircase, skimming a hand over the polished wooden banister to distract herself from dwelling on the latest ex-monster her hormones had fixated on. The villa wasn't huge, just two stories of reddish-brown stone, but it was unmistakably old, only a few minutes from the main part of the city, had what seemed like acres of lush green lawn and landscaping insulating it from the neighbors, and the furnishings were the kind even Cordelia would have ahh'ed over back in her family's IRS-dodging years. The paperwork was still in limbo on it since the previous owner's death, and apparently there were some issues with the wiring and the heating, but it had ancient ward anchors and a ley line on the property: a perfect temporary fallback position.

She shut the bathroom door behind her without even bothering to look for her luggage and started shucking clothes in a trail toward the walk-in shower. The jacket clattered as she dropped it; she'd have to remember to rescue her phone and camera later, as there were a few pix she wanted to email Giles from their undertown adventures. The rest she kicked aside in a grimy heap, then tipped her head back in the glass-walled cubicle and turned the hot water on full.

Heaven. Or, the next best thing. She smiled into the liquid warmth pouring down over her skin, and spent the next half hour reconfirming her identity to herself in the best way possible: by indulging in a little modern luxury.

* * *

By the time she was out of the shower, Dawn had come and gone already, leaving a steaming mug of caffeinated goodness and a stack of fresh clothes on the counter next to the sink. Buffy unfolded them to find a sand-colored pair of linen capris and a brown wrap shirt that showed a considerable swath of skin at both collarbones and midriff; matching practical undergarments, a pair of sturdy dark-colored sandals and a golden amulet that hummed with mild magical power completed the look. One of Willow's, probably; Buffy'd lay odds on it being dedicated to either tracking or threat detection.

She put it all on, and slipped the camera and phone into the cargo pockets on the capris. Then she stared at herself in the mirror for a long moment: stripped of makeup, mildly tanned, and dressed all in earth tones and gold. She fought down a sense of vertigo, then tied back her hair, picked up her now-empty mug and headed resolutely for the stairs. She could pretty herself up later. Food first.

The scents of cooking greeted her as she re-entered the main hall, and she followed her nose to the kitchen. Rick gave her a half-smile, then pointed at the table as he slid an omelet onto a plate. Buffy took the hint, seating herself across from a dirty plate and half-full glass of milk that told her Imhotep had already been and gone. Dawn, who'd been leaning against the counter having an animated discussion with Evy, tried to snag the new omelet as Rick walked by; he blocked her hand smoothly, then shook a finger as he crossed the tiled floor. "That's your sister's. You can wait five more minutes."

"Djal," Buffy greeted him with a nod and an appreciative smile as she accepted the offering: three eggs, cheese, tomato, and some kind of green thing-- wild onions? Sliced melon decorated the side of the plate. "Thanks; it smells great."

Rick's expression went a little puzzled, but he didn't say anything to clue her in to what had confused him, just shot a strange glance at Nafretiri-- oh. Right.

She sighed. "Did you know there was a Slayer in Seti's court?" she asked, cutting into the omelet and spearing a piece with her fork. "I don't know if you noticed, but I got disoriented a few times yesterday after we left Wolfram and Hart... I kept seeing this other place, all sand and painted walls and braziers burning in the corridors."

Evy looked startled at that; it was her turn to give her husband a significant look. "That certainly sounds familiar," she said. "Do you believe you were reliving moments in this Slayer's life?"

Buffy nodded. She remembered Evy's slips of the tongue, and the way Imhotep had referred to her, not to mention Rick's cryptic references. She wouldn't be surprised if the other woman had been through something similar. "Pretty sure. And last night the Powers gave me the 'one girl in all the Ancient world' summary version in my sleep. I have some of her memories now, plus the whole language deal. Handy, but kind of bizarre, sometimes. I have no idea why she'd call Rick a 'twig'." She put the fork in her mouth, then closed her eyes in bliss, pausing to savor the taste. "Mmmm."

When she opened them again, Evy had slid into the chair between hers and Imhotep's. "I think-- I think it was a name, not a descriptor," she said eagerly. "And I believe-- yes, I see it now." Dark eyes traveled avidly over Buffy's features before she continued.

"There was a northern woman among the servants in the temple of Sekhmet, though I never saw her at court. I was curious the first time I encountered her, and asked if she was related to...." Her eyes darted to Rick. "To one of my bodyguard, who was also of foreign blood. However, that wasn't the case. I was informed she was Paniwi, the bringer; and that her mysteries were not mine to know. This is fascinating; I haven't met anyone else whose past life crossed Nefertiri's since we lost Ardeth."

Buffy blinked at the name, glancing briefly at her sister with wide eyes. "The bringer? Seriously?"

Dawn snorted and clapped a hand over her mouth, though her eyes were dancing. "You just don't have any luck with names, do you?"

"Well, that's kind of wigsome and not at all portentous," Buffy said, swallowing. "But so not the reason I brought this up. I just wanted you to know, I can talk to him now, too, and if I say something weird-- I keep having these flashbacks. Like catching skewed reflections in a mirror out of the corner of my eye."

"I know how that feels," Evy said, sympathetically, and laid a hand over her own. "Learning I was once Nefertiri wasn't an easy process." Then she shook herself and stood up again, visibly restraining her curiosity. "But I don't mean to keep you from your breakfast; we can talk about that later. Only-- is there anything else we should know about last night? Imhotep said that you'd defeated all of your opponents and that nothing else of significance occurred, but I find it difficult to trust his concept of what's important."

Her expression went grim with long-banked grief and anger as she mentioned their guest, and Buffy bit her lip, wondering again just how bad things had been for her new friends at Imhotep's hands. She knew she had a tendency to block out anything but what was in front of her when it suited her interests to do so; if she'd learned nothing else from Robin and Giles that last, frustrating year in Sunnydale, it had been that other people's grievances weren't hers to erase. They didn't have the right to kill him, not if they wanted to maximize their odds of survival, but they did have every right to hate him.

"Look, I know what he's done," she said. "And I know he's dangerous; I won't pretend he was never evil. But he gave his word to you, and I believe he's good for it. He's on our side 'til this is over."

Rick appeared behind Evy, skillet abandoned to Dawn's care as he set his hands on his wife's shoulders. "I hope you understand that's kind of hard for _us_ to believe. He kidnapped our son. He tried to sacrifice Evy the first time we met him, and Anck-su-namun _did_ kill her the second time around. No-- the _first_ time I didn't even know what I was meeting, just that it scared the shit out of me and a whole lot of legionnaires died because of it. And the Twelve Tribes were decimated the last time he rose. Nearly two in ten of our warriors died at Ahm Shere."

Buffy shook her head, firmly. "Not gonna make excuses for him. Or bow to him; the memories aren't affecting me _that_ much. Just-- remember he's not undead anymore. He doesn't have his priests, _or_ his sneaky consort, _or_ his crazy ten-plagues powers, and he told me himself there's nothing left for him in this world. He has a perfect reason to hurt people _other_ than us while he works out whether or not he wants to live without her."

Rick's mouth twisted at that, and he looked down at the top of his wife's head; she tilted her chin up to meet his gaze, and sighed. "Forgive me if I say I hope he doesn't. Neither of us will confront him directly-- but if he confronts _us_ , all bets are off," Evy replied for them.

"I'll try and make sure he doesn't," Buffy replied, then eyed the cooling remains of her lovely omelet. "And, back to your original question? Nothing _did_ happen. We fought, I kicked butt, he raised these totally creepy gravity-defying mummies out of the street to help us, we won, the end."

Rick shuddered. "I know those things. They're gone now, right?" He glanced suspiciously toward the front hallway.

"Dusted at dawn, I think," Buffy assured him.

Her sister plunked down at the table then, something that looked a lot like a peanut butter and pickle omelet in front of her. "More like dusted at Buffy, judging from how you looked when you got here," she joked.

Buffy rolled her eyes, then finally took another bite of the cooling, yet still yummy breakfast. The taste was almost enough to block out the visual of Dawn's plate.

Her third bite, unfortunately, was interrupted by a roaring sound and the clanging of the wards. She swallowed, looking up at Rick and Evy in alarm. "That sounded like it came from out front."

Evy went pale. "Imhotep went for a walk in the gardens; if Asim arrived early..."

 _Crap_. If the O'Connell's hadn't talked to the Medjai in the last couple of days... and Imhotep wasn't recharged yet....

Buffy dropped her fork and bolted, not sure which side would need her intervention more.


	9. Chapter 9

The gardens around the old house in Rome were a lot more formal than anything Buffy had played in growing up. No casually tended flowerbeds here; instead, there were aisles of weed-fringed brick between slightly tattered walls of topiary, ponds clogged with water plants ragged around the edges from the hungry mouths of bright koi, stone bridges arching there and back again from island to path, and lots of statuary stained from years of rain and migrating birds. Everything needed a good scrub and a haircut to be magazine-worthy, but it still had a kind of shabby dignity to it.

On a better day, Buffy wouldn't have minded spending a couple of hours out there, just soaking up the scents of green and sunshine. On a day when she hadn't even finished breakfast and the wards were announcing serious hostile intent on the property? It might as well have been the basement of the last Sunnydale High.

She sped down the stairs from the house, sandals slapping on the stone flags, then took the first row of low, boxy shrubs at a vault, heading for the source of the noise without paying much attention to the layout of the paths. Somewhere behind her, she could hear the O'Connells scrambling to follow; she hoped they'd grabbed some kind of weapon just in case, because she'd shed all of hers in the bathroom and hadn't even thought to snag a fork.

Dawn had better be staying put, though. And she'd better be leaving Buffy's omelet alone!

She lost a sandal on the next row of bushes, and cursed under her breath as she stubbed a toe sticking the landing. The roar had died down, though the wards were still clanging, and somewhere ahead of her she could hear people arguing. A big leafy archway and wall adorned with vines framed a little clearing cater-cornered in front of the house; it was normally a quiet little nook, decorated with statues of Roman gods, a couple of big stone vases, a bench, and a little burbling fountain. Its current occupants were a lot less peaceful. One of them, the voice that didn't sound familiar, was shouting in a language that sounded like Arabic; the other was quieter, too quiet to make out the words, but from the almost chant-like rhythm and the unmistakable malice it was pretty obvious who was being yelled at.

"Couldn't this have waited until after more coffee?" Buffy muttered as she sprinted through the arch, only to stumble as she plowed right into the back of a big guy wearing an embroidered linen tunic. "Oof! Um, sorry for the hands, but you're a little... in the way...."

The stranger felt like a wall of muscle under Buffy's accidentally questing fingers; he was at least as tall as Imhotep, but smelled a little like horse and heated steel, not the warm sand and subtle spices she'd been half-expecting. Which, when had she memorized what Imhotep smelled like, anyway? That was really getting to be a problem. She stepped back for a better view and got an eyeful of dark, wavy hair, an olive complexion, startlingly blue eyes-- and a really gorgeous, tattooed profile that could only belong to Rick and Evy's great-grandson, Asim. Who was totally ignoring her arrival, clutching at his throat and spitting unintelligible curses at the man standing on the other side of the garden alcove.

Imhotep's eyes were heavy-lidded with fury as he clutched his fist in the air, doing his best impersonation of Darth Vader. He was already nearly as gray with weariness as he'd been the night before, though, his hand shaking with the effort; she'd been right to worry about his batteries running down toward empty. A third guy, dressed in the same tunic and trousers outfit as Asim, held the point of a slightly curved sword to the hollow of Imhotep's throat.

"Hey!" she objected, shoving at Asim more deliberately this time. "Is this how your grandparents taught you to treat their guests? 'Cause so far, I am _not_ impressed, Mr. 'We Who are the Descendants of Evelyn Carnahan O'Connell'."

Whether it was the shove or the distraction, whatever force had been holding Asim in place broke; he stumbled a few paces forward, turning to look at her with an incredulous expression. Beyond him, Imhotep slowly lowered his fist, the hatred that had carved his face into harsh lines fading into something less violent but no less dark as he glanced between her and the Medjai.

"And you," Buffy said, planting her fists on her hips as she met Imhotep's gaze, voice faltering a little as the truth of the words layered extra meaning into her attempt at a flippant remark. "I can't take you anywhere, can I?"

Someone must have shown him to the half-bath downstairs, she noticed belatedly; he was still bare-chested, but the borrowed boots and jeans were missing, probably destined for the same laundry basket as her cobwebby, blood-stained gear. A pair of Watcher-y slacks from the safe house's emergency wardrobe hugged his thighs in a shade of brown that matched her shirt; it made her wonder what else she'd missed while she'd been luxuriating under the hot water.

That must've been a fun conversation. Could you even ask 'boxers or briefs' in ancient Egyptian? Her mind stuttered over the thought.

"You cannot mean to imply that this _creature_ is my grandmother's guest!" Asim spat in lightly accented English, one hand carefully massaging his throat. "He is...."

"Imhotep, yeah, I _know_ ," Buffy sighed. "And I guess he's more _my_ guest since I'm the Slayer who asked for her help. But same diff, since your grandparents agreed it'd be easier to rescue him than let Wolfram and Hart turn him back into-- what was it-- a _walking disease_. So I'd appreciate if your buddy over there would drop his sword before I have to make him."

The 'Slayer' title caught both the Medjai's attention; Sword-guy stiffened at the word, then looked her up and down and said something rapid-fire in Arabic.

Asim held up a hand to shush him, then frowned at Buffy again, backing the hostility down just a little. He squared his stance like she was someone to watch as much as the guy across from him, which. Yeah, okay; she appreciated the respect that implied. She gave him half a point back for that. "You are Buffy Summers?"

"That's my name, don't wear it out," she chirped in reply, tilting up her chin. "And _you're_ the guy who bounced my friend Xander in the desert a couple years back, when he stopped to say hello to _your_ Slayer."

Asim raised his eyebrows at that, but that was the extent of his reaction; so much for Rick and Evy leaving the situation up to her to explain. "And you would _welcome_ the presence of this... _abomination_... rather than drive a sword through its heart?" he continued.

Really, like he couldn't tell there had to be something else going on? It should have been 100% obvious that the Western trousers and bare feet and lack of ostentatious jewelry kind of, you know, _meant_ something. Especially when she'd outright _said_ that Imhotep was a guest.

"Maybe you don't know, because of the whole 'Bad Council, No Slayer' issue, but Slayers _don't kill humans_. Luckily for you, that covers all three of you right now," she said, layering the words with cloying sweetness. Then she shifted her gaze back to the minion. "Sword. Drop it. _Now_."

The other Medjai exchanged a long frowny-faced glance with Asim; then, at some subtle cue, he lowered the blade and took several swift steps back. That left Buffy the closest person to the former priest. She made to close that distance, to check whether he was bleeding and make a start on trying to straighten things out, but that was when Rick and Evy finally caught up. In all the bustle of them crowding in to make sure their great-grandson hadn't been turned into sandy paste, it took her several seconds to get around them.

"Asim! You're early! What's happened?" Evy fussed, checking Junior over in a very Momlike way.

Rick had picked up a gun on the way out of the house; he took in the situation in a quick glance, then sighed and lowered the weapon, holding it alongside his thigh. He didn't look pleased, but not particularly worried, either; Buffy had noticed he was a lot more pragmatic than his wife. After taking up station between Evy and Imhotep, he nodded at the second Medjai. "Hasam. The rest of your team back at the hotel?"

Buffy ignored them all, planting herself in front of Imhotep and flexing her stubbed toes against the brick. He was scowling mightily, but not projecting half the arrogance of the day before. She could see the way he braced himself against one of the massive vases, though, and guessed it was the bleak endurance of the worn-to-the-bone and just-dragged-from-the-afterlife rather than anything approaching actual patience. She hadn't forgotten what that felt like, or how it had left her utterly unable to handle anything approaching apology, platitude, or criticism.

Had it really been less than eighteen hours since she'd stood between him and her allies to protect _them_ , not the other way around? What a difference a day made.

"I know, I know," she said, giving him a sympathetic grimace as she stretched up to brush her fingers over the scratch at the hollow of his throat. It was still a little wigsome, hearing foreign sounds come out of her mouth and actually understanding their meaning, but she was starting to get the hang of it. "We kind of have to put up with him though; he's an O'Connell. And he's here chasing the chest with the curse; someone stole it just before Wolfram and Hart called you up. If they didn't just take it as a distraction, will they have to make another one now?"

The corners of Imhotep's mouth curled downward in black humor. " _There is one, the undead, who, if brought back to life, is bound by sacred law to consummate this curse_ ," he intoned, as if reciting from memory. He reached up to capture her hand, glancing first at the faint smear of blood on her thumb, then back to her eyes, studying her as if searching for something. "The incantation was as nameless as my burial."

A faint tremor passed through the hand caught in his grasp, and Buffy swallowed, caught off guard yet again by the intensity of the tangled reactions bubbling up within her. Bald had never really been her thing before, but he radiated heat and spice like the desert sands he'd come from, and something about the combination of his presence and the ache of history in his eyes was hitting her right in the id. Part the ancient Slayer's awe, part her own appreciation and sympathy-- she didn't think she could pick the threads apart if she tried.

"So they could use it again, so long as the new guy's made nameless, too; check," she somehow managed to say.

He nodded slightly, narrowing his eyes at her speculatively; then his gaze flicked back to the knot of O'Connells. "You did not seek me out to ask that question. You came to defend me."

It was said as a statement, but his tone implied a question. Buffy frowned at him, not sure what he was getting at, and replied in kind. "Of course. You didn't ask to be brought back, any more than I did."

For some reason, that seemed to amuse him, rather than offend his pride. "Such contradictions abound in you, Paniwi. She who brings, is brought, and yet will bring many things."

Buffy was _really_ not sure what to make of _that_. Fortunately, something about his phrasing caught Evy's attention, enough to distract her from her grandson before Buffy could stutter out a reply. She stared round-eyed at Imhotep for a brief moment, then cleared her throat and nudged her husband's arm.

"Yes, well, perhaps we had better take this conversation back to the house...?"

Buffy flushed and pulled her hand out of Imhotep's grip. Rick caught the motion as he glanced over to see what was up with his wife, then blinked and seemed to reassess something as well. 

"Uh, right. Kind of in the open out here. Guys, have you eaten? We were in the middle of making breakfast...."

He pressed a wide, callused hand to the small of his wife's back, then made an after-you gesture to the guys. And just like that, all four of them were moving, though Asim's gaze lingered on her as he passed by. That had actually been pretty smooth; she might have to ask Rick for a few leadership tips, sometime.

Which, on the subject of tactics and strategy... the part of her brain that had been taking a back seat to emotion and instinct that morning suddenly sat up again and took notice.

Imhotep hadn't ended up with muscle like that by hunching over a shrine all day, and she'd _seen_ him fight. "Why Asim, and why the throat thing? Why not grab one of their swords? You didn't actually _need_ rescuing, no matter how tired you were, did you. Why let things happen that way?"

Amusement deepened into something more intent and evaluative in Imhotep's gaze. "You ask many questions to which you already know the answers, Paniwi. Shall I answer one you have not yet known to ask?"

Checking to see how close they were watching him, Buffy mused; yeah, she did have a pretty good idea of the answers. Seeing how they'd respond. Trying to keep from escalating the situation, to preserve as many options he could as long as possible. To deliberately reduce their evaluation of him as a threat, while accurately gauging _their_ capabilities. Because he really was tired, and didn't want to bother. Or all of the above. She had to remember not to underestimate him.

"And what answer is that?" she said, suspiciously.

"One who has commanded the god's armies before," he replied.

Buffy blinked at him, then sucked in a sharp breath. "Who will they call up next?" she filled in the ask. Was he seriously implying that they'd summon someone like _the Scorpion King_? Wouldn't that be even more dangerous than calling up Imhotep?

"Only during the Year of the Scorpion may any mortal challenge Anubis' champion," Imhotep clarified. "To defeat him at any other time, a warrior blessed of the gods must be chosen."

Which-- huh. That reminded her: Osiris hadn't been the senior god of the Underworld when Ahm Shere was built. That role had belonged to Anubis; thank you, ancient Slayer memories. But that skewed oddly against the things they'd assumed about Imhotep and the O'Connells; she'd have to talk to Rick about the destiny thing again later.

"I'm guessing those are a little hard to come by these days?"

He lifted a brow in eloquent disdain.

Great, another thing to research. Along with, why was Wolfram and Hart making the attempt in the first place, if the timing wasn't right?

Or was it more Ilona's deal than Wolfram and Hart's in general? Angel had proven that individual CEOs could act on their own. And then there was the issue of Paolo. Exactly how old was the Immortal again? Ilona _had_ mentioned him when they'd run into each other, yesterday.

"I'll tell the others," she frowned. "Unless...?"

"The answer is yours to do with what you will. I will remain in the garden to welcome the day."

The statement was made blandly, but out there among statues of gods she didn't recognize, Buffy was pretty sure what that meant. Priest; right. Had the Romans assimilated Osiris into their pantheon? Something else to ask, another time. "I'll just... leave you to that, then."

Imhotep inclined his head, eyes still on her as she turned to walk away. 

Her lost sandal was waiting for her, halfway up the path; she picked it up with a sigh and followed the others back toward the kitchen.

...Where she found an empty plate, populated only by eggy crumbs.

Well, at least there were still two nonconfusing anchors in Buffy's universe: her life still wasn't a Disney princess story, and the plague of humanity that was her little sister was still doing what little sisters did.

"Dawn!" she yelled at the top of her lungs.

At the table, two Medjai exchanged a glance, and Rick chuckled, turning the stove back on.

"Everything okay, then?" he asked, eying her carefully.

"Ask again later," she sighed. "Omelet me, please? And then I guess we better start discussing what to do next."


End file.
